Emotional ambivalence fuels creativity

I found this item on the excellent management-issues.com web site:

People who are emotionally ambivalent – simultaneously feeling positive and negative emotions – tend to be more creative in the workplace than those who feel just happy or sad, or lack emotion at all, according to a new study.

That's because people who feel mixed emotions interpret the experience as a signal that they are in an unusual environment and respond to it by drawing on their creative thinking abilities, according to Christina Ting Fong, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Business School.

This increased sensitivity for recognising unusual associations, which happy or sad workers probably couldn't detect, is what leads to creativity in the workplace, she says.

Get the full story here.

I do wonder what results they would have got if they had looked at levels of excitement, rather than whether the respondents were happy, sad, neutral or ambivalent.