The angrier or the happier the more creative? The impact of anger and joy induction on creative problem-solving and divergent thinking

In contrast to the conventional reasoning process that relies heavily on cognitive control, an individual's creativity may show an increasing trend when the cognitive control function is suppressed. A typical situation in which this occurs is low cognitive inhibition triggered by strong anger. In studies of the influence of anger on creativity, the creative tasks used were mostly divergent-thinking tasks, and few studies have compared the impact of anger and joy on general thinking and creative thinking directly. In addition to using an Alternative-Uses Task (AUT) that reflects divergent thinking, this study also adopted the matching routine and novel chunk-decomposition tasks to evaluate general and novel problem-solving, respectively. We also focused on the impact of angry and joy moods on creative tasks, comparing them with a control condition of neutral mood. The results revealed that the induction of an anger emotion promotes an individual's divergent thinking more than that of a joy emotion, and that both anger and joy are effective ways for creative problem-solving. Furthermore, anger reduced the reaction time while joy increased the accuracy rate to facilitate the creative problem-solving.