Four experiments indicated that positive affect, induced by means of seeing a few minutes of a comedy film or by means of receiving a small bag of candy, improved performance on two tasks that are generally regarded as requiring creative ingenuity: Duncker's (1945) candle task and M. T. Mednick, S. A. Mednick, and E. V. Mednick's (1964) Remote Associates Test. One condition in which negative affect was induced and two in which subjects engaged in physical exercise (intended to represent affectless arousal) failed to produce comparable improvements in creative performance. The influence of positive affect on creativity was discussed in terms of a broader theory of the impact of positive affect on cognitive organization.

Recent research has suggested that positive affect can influence the way cognitive material is organized and thus may influence creativity. Studies using three types of tasks (typicality rating, sorting, and word association) indicated that persons in whom positive affect had been induced differed from those in control conditions in the associations that they gave to common, neutral words (Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson, 1985) and in the pattern and degree of relatedness that they depicted among stimulus elements (Isen & Daubman, 1984). It has been suggested that these differences are due to differences between the groups in the tendency to relate and integrate divergent material. This process of bringing together apparently disparate material in a useful or reasonable but unaccustomed way is central to most current conceptualizations of the creative process (e.g., Koestler, 1964; S. A. Mednick, 1962). Thus, it seems likely that positive affect may promote creativity.

In one of these series of studies, it was found that persons in whom positive affect had been induced (in any of three ways) tended...