Effects Of Anger Emotions On Malevolent Creativity

Malevolent creativity is a type of creativity that deliberately harms others(or oneself,an organization and society).The products of malevolent creativity in various fields and its negative consequences are attracting more and more attention from researchers.There is a growing body of research on the factors that influence malevolent creativity.It has been shown that,similar to creativity,there is a strong association between malevolent creativity and emotions.A review of research on the relationship between emotion and creativity reveals that emotions of different potencies contribute to creativity,but whether this contribution is also present in malevolent creativity needs to be further explored.In addition,situational cognitive theory states that cognition has embodied properties.Both creativity and malevolent creativity are essentially cognitive activities.Therefore,it is necessary to introduce an embodied perspective to further refine the study when investigating the effect of emotion on malevolent creativity.In terms of potency and arousal,anger,which is low in potency and high in arousal,stands out among the various emotions associated with malevolent creativity.On the one hand,maliciousness,the “dark property” of malevolent creativity itself,is often considered to be associated with low valence.On the other hand,high arousal,the basis of cognitive activation,is also inextricably linked to creative cognitive activity.Therefore,this study first focuses on the effect of negative emotions on malevolent creativity,selecting anger and disgust emotions for the study and comparing the difference in the effect of the two negative emotions on malevolent creativity.The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of different body postures on malevolent creativity in individuals under conditions of anger from an embodied perspective.In Study 1,an autobiographical recall task was used to elicit emotions,and a comparison of individuals’ performance on three malevolent creativity tasks,namely,hurtful,deceitful and teasing,under three different emotional conditions: anger,disgust and neutrality,revealed that both low-efficacy,high-arousal anger and disgust contributed to individuals’ performance on hurtful and teasing malevolent creativity tasks.And anger contributed more to malevolent creativity than disgust.Second,the present study aimed to investigate the effect of different body postures on malevolent creativity of individuals under the condition of anger emotion from the embodied perspective.In Study 2,subjects were asked to maintain an expanded,huddled,or controlled body posture throughout the completion of the different types of malevolent creativity tasks after emotion elicitation.The results showed that in the anger emotion condition,both the expanded and curled postures scored higher in fluency,novelty and malevolence on the malevolent creativity task than the control posture.Comparing the expanded and huddled postures revealed that the facilitation effect of the expanded posture was superior to the huddled posture in terms of fluency and novelty there was no significant difference between the two in terms of malevolence.Under neutral mood,neither the expanded nor the curled posture showed a significant facilitation effect on malevolent creativity.In addition,no facilitation or weakening effects of emotion or body posture on deceptive malevolent creativity task fluency,novelty,or maliciousness were observed in either Study 1 or Study 2.Combining Study 1 and Study 2,the facilitation of curled-up posture on malevolent creativity in individuals with angry emotions may be facilitated by the expanded posture facilitated malevolent creativity by providing positive contextual cues that reduced attentional narrowing and thus affected the cognitive flexibility of individuals in angry moods.In addition,the performance of different types of malevolent creativity tasks in Studies 1 and 2was not entirely consistent,with the fluency,novelty,and maliciousness of the deceptive malevolent creativity task showing no influence by emotion or body posture,which may reveal qualitative differences between the different types of malevolent creativity performance that should be noted.