Positive Emotions Ignite Creativity
Positivity opens our hearts and minds, making us more receptive and creative.
Author: Kellie Cummings
Image: @jessbailey.com.au
Topic
Positive Emotions
The science
Positive emotions and negative emotions operate on different time scales. Negative emotions help us react quickly while positive emotions broaden and build our skills for the future.
Why it matters
Because positive emotions are more subtle and diffuse than negative emotions, they are often undervalued. Organizations and leaders who understand and embrace positive emotions are at an advantage.
Have you ever wondered why we know so much about negative emotions and so little about positive emotions? Back in 1998, a pioneering researcher named Barbara Fredrickson asked this same question and discovered that social scientists weren’t taking positive emotions seriously. In her paper: What Good Are Positive Emotions? Fredrickson observed that the field of psychology was attracted to solving problems, and since positive emotions didn’t reflect a problem, they were simply not viewed as important.
But her observations went further, and this is where her paper gets particularly interesting. Fredrickson noticed that when scientists did study positive emotions, they modeled their assessments on negative emotions. But positive emotions don’t trigger immediate and observable reactions such as: fight, flight, or freeze. Evaluated based on the thought-action tendencies of negative emotions, the value of positive emotions was unobservable. Fredrickson challenged the scientific community’s practice of “shoehorning” positive emotions into “a single general-purpose model of emotion.” That statement might not sound like a big deal until you think about the fact that Fredrickson was telling the scientific establishment that their methods—and results—were flawed. And for a young, female scientist to make such a statement in 1998 was uncommon and brave.
So, what good are positive emotions?
Thanks to Barbara Fredrickson, we now know quite a lot about our more uplifting emotions—and the myriad ways in which they help us do the things we want to do, such as thinking creatively. In her 1998 paper, which has been cited over 8000 times, Fredrickson established a new model for investigating positive emotions, called the Broaden and Build Theory. Here’s a sampling of what she’s discovered in the subsequent decades:
While negative emotions affect us powerfully and often generate the urge to take action, positive emotions are more subtle and open our hearts and minds to be more receptive, more playful, and more creative.
Positive emotions broaden our attention and expand our awareness of which actions we can take. This expansive view allows us to create more accurate mental maps of the world through exploration and experiential learning. By contrast, negativity and neutrality narrow our focus and constrain our experience of the world.
Positive emotions broaden our view of ourselves, which strengthens relationships, by reducing the boundaries that separate me from you. Moreover, studies have shown that positive emotions reduce racial bias.
Not surprisingly, positivity improves brainstorming. People who feel amused or serene came up with longer lists of ideas than those who felt neutral.
Students do better on standardized tests when they enter having self-generated a positive emotion.
How can leaders employ positive emotions?
When we think about applying positive emotions in the workplace, it’s probably helpful to begin with a nod to the naysayers and to be very clear that no one is advocating for toxic positivity. Gratuitous praise is insincere and can undermine trust. Even Fredrickson recommends a balance between positive and negative emotions.
Here are a few tips
The first thing to note is that we can’t will ourselves to feel positivity. We can’t force ourselves to feel joy, gratitude, or awe. To activate these feelings, we must find triggers that turn on our positivity. These levers can be actions or thoughts. For example, the feeling of awe can be awakened by hiking up a mountain or looking at a majestic image. The feeling of gratitude can be activated by writing down something we are grateful for and taking a moment to acknowledge how that person or item improves our life.
The levers that activate our emotions can redirect conscious thought, and that is powerful.
Because all of our emotions arise from how we interpret events, the role of a leader is tremendously important for guiding and framing events in a constructive manner. Adversity is real and it is a common feature how work gets done, but your team has probably faced adversity before. As a leader, you can activate feelings of hope and spark a feeling of pride in the work at hand.
When things are less than perfect, encourage your team to ask: what’s going right on this team right now? Then ask them as individuals to answer: what’s going right for me right now? When we focus on what’s going right, we’re not ignoring problems, but we are learning to build on our strengths. If we overlook our strengths, because of a bias toward problems, then we fail to learn from and build upon our own success.
If you want your team to be more creative and innovative—which is particularly important when things aren’t going well—consider the power of positive emotions such as hope, pride, and inspiration to expand your team’s awareness of possibility and ability to think creatively when you need it most.