Interactive Effects of Mood and Task Framing on Creative Generation

ABSTRACT

This study introduced a motivational compatibility account for the influence of mood on creative generation. Building upon the feelings-as-information framework, it was proposed that positive moods signal to individuals that they are safe, motivating them to take advantage of this presumed safety by seeking stimulation and incentives (i.e., having fun), whereas negative moods signal to individuals that there are problems at hand, motivating them to solve these problems. Based on these assumptions, it was predicted that positive and negative moods should enhance effort on creative generation tasks construed as compatible with the motivational orientations they respectively elicit. Specifically, positive, relative to negative, moods were predicted to enhance effort on tasks construed as fun and silly, whereas negative, relative to positive, moods were predicted to bolster effort on tasks construed as serious and important. Evidence for this model, and several of its underlying assumptions, was adduced in 3 experiments in which mood was manipulated and participants completed creative generation tasks that were framed as either fun or serious. Results are discussed with an eye toward addressing alternative theoretical explanations.

Notes

¹Although administration of only a single alternative uses test item (i.e., brick) may have allowed for undue error in measurement, additional items were not included because it was assumed that participants' situationally-induced moods would have faded over time such that they would have had little or no influence on subsequent dependent measures.

² , where a and b represent the unstandardized regression coefficients for paths a and b and and represent the standard errors of these coefficients

³Unsurprisingly, measures of task motivation and expected task liking were strongly correlated, r = .65; however, we deemed this correlation too low in magnitude to warrant collapsing the measures into a unitary index. Therefore, we conducted separate Sobel tests for each measure.