Environmentally Induced Positive Affect: Its Impact on Self-Efficacy, Task Performance, Negotiation, and Conflict1

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.

A pilot study and two experiments investigated the influence of positive affect, induced in three differing ways, on the uniqueness of word associations. Persons in the positive-affect conditions gave more unusual first-associates to neutral words, according to the Palermo & Jenkins (1964) norms, than did subjects in the control conditions. In Study 3, where word type (positive, neutral, negative) was a second factor along with affect, in a between-subjects design, associates to positive words were also more unusual and diverse than were those to other words. These results were related to those of studies suggesting that positive affect may facilitate creative problem solving and to other work suggesting an impact of positive feelings on cognitive organization.