State Of Anxiety Affects The FNIRS Study Of Creative Cognitive Processes

In recent years,the link between affect and creativity has become a hot research area.A large number of studies has shown that positive affect promotes creative performance,but the relationship between negative affect and creativity remains unclear.Among relation between negative affect and creativity,anxiety might be the one of the most concerned mood in the negative affect.Probably because many studies have shown that anxiety has an influence on cognitive process and behavior performance,and there is a correlation between creativity and mood disorder.However,previous studies regarding creativity and anxiety mainly focused on creative performance instead of creative process.Due to different cognitive process involved in different phrases of creative cognition,anxiety could have different influences on different phrases.Therefore,the present study elicits state anxiety of participant with combined induction method,and investigates the influence of state anxiety on creative process.The mood induction method was adapted from Grillon(2012),which has been successfully used in a wild variety of studies,especially.in the studies of neurobiological underpinnings of mood states.This method combines music induction and velton induction.The participants were asked to read 60 mood-congruent sentences while listening to music with same mood,and were also required to complete visual analogue scale before and after the induction.The results showed that this method successfully elicited state anxiety of participants and mood state continued to exist after the experiment.The experiment 1 was to explore the influence of state anxiety on creative idea generation.The procedure of this experiment is as follow:first,eliciting neutral affect with neutral sentences and neutral music;second,completing alternative uses tasks;then,eliciting anxiety affect with anxious sentences and anxious music;finally,completing alternative uses tasks.The behavior results showed that state anxiety promoted novelty of creative idea generation,but hindered fluency and appropriateness of creative idea generation.The results from fNIRS showed that state anxiety was related to increased activation in middle temporal gyrus(MTG)and superior temporal gyrus(STG),but decreased activation in inferior frontal gyrus(IFG)and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex(DLPFC).These results suggested that state anxiety affected cognitive shifting and cognitive inhibition,activated information in long-term memory,but had a negative influence on retrieving and selecting remote association and combing semantic conception.The experiment 2 was to explore the influence of state anxiety on creative evaluation.The evaluation procedure was adapted from Silvia(2008),and required participants to select two most creative ideas out of six idea.The procedure of experiment 2 was as follow:first,eliciting neutral affect with neutral sentences and neutral music;second,completing evaluation tasks;then,eliciting anxiety affect with anxiety sentences and anxiety music;finally,completing evaluation tasks.The behavior results showed that state anxiety promoted novelty of creative evaluation,but hindered appropriateness of creative evaluation.The results from fNIRS showed that state anxiety was related to more activation in MTG,STG,IFG,and DLPFC.These results suggested that anxiety affected normal cognitive process,therefore participants could not consider novelty and appropriateness at the same time,and effectively evaluate and select the most creative idea.It increased the negative evaluation bias and decreased the performance of more complex task.Even though activation in DLPFC increased,it did not promote performance of creative evaluation.In conclusion,state anxiety increases novelty but decreases appropriateness of creative idea generation and evaluation.The results of fNIRS reveals different influences of anxiety on creative idea generation and evaluation.