The Effect Of Anger On Malevolent Creativity And Emotion Regulation

Creativity could have dark side.Malevolent creativity(MC)is a special kind of creativity that deliberately harm others through various ways.Anger,as a unique and basic emotion,may play an important role in influencing MC.But until now,there is no research to focus this effect.The current study aimed to investigate the effects of anger on creativity and the three types of MC,and consider whether emotion regulation could reduce the MC from a practical perspective.In study 1,we investigated the effects of different emotions on creativity and the MC.Specifically,the emotions were induced by autobiographical memory task,the creativity and MC were measured by alternative uses task(AUT)and the malevolent creativity task(MCT),which adapted from realistic presented problem(RPP),and the implicit aggression(IA)was measured by preference-phrase method.The results indicated that individuals in anger condition showed higher creativity and higher MC than sad and neutral conditions.The enhancement of anger on MC was relatively stable and has not changed significantly over time,but individuals in anger condition tended to generate more and original ideas in early but not in later phases of AUT.In addition,implicit aggression mediated the effect of anger on MC.Whereas arousal mediated the effect of anger on fluency and originality of MCT and AUT.Study 2 was conducted to further explore the effects of anger,fear,and neutral emotions on different MC.Hurting people task,lying task,and playing tricks task were used to measure different MC.The results showed that individuals in anger condition showed higher MC in three different tasks than fear and neutral conditions.And implicit aggression mediated the effect of anger on different MC.Arousal mediated the effect of anger on fluency and originality of hurting people MCT.It has demonstrated that anger promotes MC in study 1 and study 2.Study 3 investigated the influence of emotion regulation on MC by using cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression.The results indicated that individuals in cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression condition showed lower MC than control conditions.Both emotion regulation strategies could regulate anger and reduce the implicit aggression and arousal of individual,which result the decline of MC.In conclusion,the current study revealed that anger could enhance creativity and different MC.Implicit aggression and arousal play an important role in the effect.The above findings enrich the study of MC and provide evidence for future research.Furthermore,it’s also proved that the cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression could effectively reduce the MC.In daily life,the use of emotion regulation has contributed to the development of individual and society.