title: Creative mood swings: divergent and convergent thinking affect mood in opposite ways.
abstract: Increasing evidence suggests that emotions affect cognitive processes. Recent approaches have also considered the opposite: that cognitive processes might affect people's mood. Here we show that performing and, to a lesser degree, preparing for a creative thinking task induce systematic mood swings: Divergent thinking led to a more positive mood, whereas convergent thinking had the opposite effect. This pattern suggests that thought processes and mood are systematically related but the type of relationship is process-specific.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Psychology Unit and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Soghra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Akbari Chermahini
authors.forename: Bernhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hommel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001143:Arousal; D003405:Creativity; D006801:Humans; D013850:Thinking