Creativity and Emotion: Enhancing Creative Thinking by the Manipulation of Computational Feedback to Determine Emotional Intensity

Positive emotions can enhance the ability of people to generate original ideas, and its intensity can determine the degree to which people are able to think originally. How to design a technology that can be used to hack into this link between the intensity of positive emotion and creative thinking is, however, still an open problem. To address this we have conceived, developed, and experimentally evaluated a proof-of-concept interactive system that generates believable computational feedback about the originality of a user’s own ideas in real-time. This system can manipulate this feedback to make a user’s own ideas appear more or less original than people would typically judge them to be, and can also vary the order of this manipulation over time. This has enabled us to test experimentally that: (i) the order in which the positivity and negativity of the feedback is varied can be used to condition people’s expectations, which (ii) can be used to later determine an intended intensity a positive emotion that a user experience, and which (iii) subsequently influence the degree to which the user is able to generate original ideas. The findings demonstrate that an interactive system can be designed to determine the type and intensity of an emotional response, in a manner that enhances the people’s ability to generate original ideas.