Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many researchers claim that negative emotions inhibit creativity. However, describing emotions in a safe environment hasbeneficial effects: it allows for the restructuring of difficult experiences, as a result, we discover the world again, whichcan influence creativity. The classic method of writing about emotions is long-term one. The hereby study was an attemptto verify, if one session of expressive writing improves creative thinking. This hypothesis was tested in an experimentalstudy by exposing participants (N = 60) to emotionally laden content. Participants viewed unpleasant images. The firstgroup wrote about their emotions in connection with the images. The second described their typical day. At the end allparticipants solved creativity measure (Alternative Uses Task). After each stage, emotions of respondents were measured.The conducted analyses had shown that, performance was better in the unpleasant emotions describing condition. At thesame time, negative emotions persistence has been observed.