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Saturday, October 23, 2010

Creativity and Sadness

Does sadness make us more creative?  In Wired/Frontal Cortex.  My own informal innovation center observations would say otherwise,  but this may depend more strongly on the context and driving goals of the task at hand.  The article provides some thoughts on the subject:

" ... Well, it turns out the cliché might be true after all: Angst has creative perks. That, at least, is the conclusion of Modupe Akinola, a professor at Columbia Business School, in her paper “The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity.” The experiment was simple: She asked subjects to give a short speech about their dream job. The students were randomly assigned to either a positive or negative feedback condition, in which their speech was greeted with smiles and vertical nods (positive) or frowns and horizontal shakes (negative). After the speech was over, the subjects were given glue, paper and colored felt and told to create a collage using the materials. Professional artists then evaluated each collage for creativity ... "

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