Emotional ambivalence fuels creativity
I found this item on the excellent management-issues.com web site:
People who are emotionally ambivalent – simultaneously feeling
positive and negative emotions – tend to be more creative in the
workplace than those who feel just happy or sad, or lack emotion at
all, according to a new study.
That’s because people who feel
mixed emotions interpret the experience as a signal that they are in an
unusual environment and respond to it by drawing on their creative
thinking abilities, according to Christina Ting Fong, an assistant
professor at the University of Washington Business School.
This
increased sensitivity for recognising unusual associations, which happy
or sad workers probably couldn’t detect, is what leads to creativity in
the workplace, she says.
Get the full story here.
I do wonder what results they would have got if they had looked at levels of excitement, rather than whether the respondents were happy, sad, neutral or ambivalent.