Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Both attentional focus and creativity have been shown to differ depending on the emotional state one is experiencing. We hypothesize that different positive emotions, in this case amusement, enthusiasm and awe, induce characteristically different breadths of attentional focus that are reflective of their respective evolutionary functions and levels of approach motivation. Ultimately we predict that high-approach motivations such as enthusiasm will result in attentional localization and an overall decrease in creativity, whereas low-approach motivations, such as amusement and awe, will result in attentional globalization and overall increased levels of creativity. In this study 105 participants read an emotion inducing story, followed by a globalization attentional focus test, the Alternate Uses Task test for creativity, and an emotion manipulation check. A 1-way ANOVA followed by several t-tests were completed to compare the effects of the different emotion conditions as a whole, and then individually against one another. The experiment was statistically underpowered, and as such there were no significant differences found either for overall emotional affects or those between emotions. However, the patterns suggested by the results of the analyses were not expected and creativity measures differed strongly from predicted results. Data collection is ongoing, and in the future problems with study underpowerment will likely be amended.