The Influence of Emotions on Attention and Creativity

This book presents a study examining the naturally occurring effects of positive affect and anxiety (exam stress at different points in the semester) on creativity and attentional performance amongst an undergraduate student population. A primary goal was to test the predictions set by the Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Resources first proposed by Fredrickson (2001). This theory claims that people who frequently experience positive emotions accumulate positive resources that aid with problem solving by widening the scope of attention. Therefore, it was predicted that people experiencing more positive emotions would exhibit increased distraction towards peripheral objects in the Eriksen Flanker Task while concurrently showing better overall performance on two semantic-based cognitive tasks. Although the mood manipulation used in this study, which was modulated by the placement of participants in stressful and non-stressful testing situations throughout the term, was successful it is intriguing that the results were unable to support the theory-based predictions. The author proposes the Load Theory of Attention by Lavie (1995) as an alternative explanation for these results.