Role of Avoidance-Motivation Intensity in Creative Thinking: Similar and Differential Effects across Creative Idea Generation and Evaluation

ABSTRACT

Dynamic, momentary affective states have significant effects on creativity; however, how negative affect modulates the neurocognitive processes involved in creativity is still unclear. This study investigated the neural mechanisms of creative thinking under varying avoidance-motivation intensity. Sixty participants (17 men and 43 women; age range = 18–25 years; mean = 21.22 years, SD = 1.35) randomly assigned to three groups (high-avoidance-motivation, low-avoidance-motivation, and unmotivated bias state) completed creative tasks in two conditions – creative idea generation and creative idea evaluation. In the former condition, the low-avoidance-motivation group exhibited greater fluency of divergent thinking than the high-avoidance-motivation group. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy revealed an interaction effect between creative demand and avoidance-motivation intensity in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and right middle frontal gyrus in creative idea generation. In the latter condition, there were no significant differences between the three avoidance motivation groups in behavior and brain activation results. Furthermore, the association of the prefrontal cortex and temporal region in these tasks indicated that these regions may be part of the core mechanism underlying the modulatory effects of avoidance-motivation intensity on ongoing neurocognitive processing during creative thinking.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding anthor.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31871118; 31700976, 32071078); National Social Science Foundation of China (19CSH047); Key project for Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment Towards Basic Education Quality at Beijing Normal University (2018-05-009-BZPK01, 2020-05-009-BZPK01); China Post-doctoral Science Foundation (2017M623099, 2018T111009); Shaanxi Post-doctoral Science Foundation (2017BSHEDZZ128); Major Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (14ZDB160); Social Science Fund Project of Shaanxi (2017P005); the Innovation Capability Support Program of Shaanxi Province, China (2020TD-037); Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK202003091, GK201902011, 2019TS132, 2019TS140) and Learning Science Interdisciplinary project of Shaanxi Normal University.