| Mind-body dissonance occurs when bodily expressions contradict mental states. Individuals have an innate aversion toward such contradictions, which often produce a sense of incongruence and uncertainty and result in heightened stress as well as decreased encoding ability. Building off the work showing that incongruent states often catalyze creativity, I propose that mind-body dissonance facilitates creativity because the sense of incongruence motivates extensive search for novel insights. Because mind-body dissonance also generates a sense of uncertainty, I predict that it leads people to perceive atypical but ultimately illusory connections.;Ten studies investigated whether the sense of incongruence associated with mind-body dissonance facilitates creativity. Studies 1-5b found that multiple manipulations of mind-body dissonance -- recalling a happy memory while frowning, remembering a sad event while smiling, having a high-power mindset in a lower-power posture, or having a low-power mindset in a high-power posture -- created incongruent feelings, and facilitated associative thinking, integrative complexity, category inclusiveness, and creative insights. Study 6 found that mixed emotions but not cognitive dissonance produced similar effects. Study 7 involved a customer service simulation and revealed that participants who bodily expressed positive feelings toward irritating customers experienced greater creativity. Using a misattribution paradigm, Study 8 found that, when individuals were given the opportunity to attribute their incongruent feelings to an external cause, mind-body dissonance no longer facilitated creativity. Misattributing their uncertainty and a lack of control, however, did not eliminate this creativity effect.;Three final studies demonstrated that the uncertainty associated with mind-body dissonance produced the perception of illusory patterns. Studies 9-10 found that recalling a happy memory while frowning or a sad event while smiling led participants to experience a lack of control, form superstitions, perceive conspiracies, and see images in visual noise. Study 11 revealed that, when individuals were given the opportunity to misattribute their uncertainty or incongruence to an external cause, mind-body dissonance no longer generated the perception of illusory patterns.;I discuss the implications of this research for embodied views of emotions, theories on feelings and processing styles, the adaptive functions of contradictory experiences, and organizational practices that encourage individual creativity and alleviate cognitive biases. |
