Emotions in Social Creativity

Peter Österberg
Department of Psychology, Lund University

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate emotions in the context of social and organizational creativity. Motivation explains all kinds of behaviors, including creativity. Emotions can act as a facilitator in that process. But where motivation should be high to drive performance, emotions should be moderate in order to stimulate creative thinking.
Keywords: Leadership, organization, motivation, emotion, social creativity. 13 pages.

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Österberg (2004) proposed a dual-role model where leaders should combine the assignment of goals with the decentralization of decision making concerning developing strategies to attain the goals to the level of operations in order to influence social creativity within an organization. Further, research about organizational climate and creativity demonstrates an intervening role of emotional state to the leader – performance relation (Ekvall & Ryhammar, 1998). How do emotions play into these interactions where social creativity is the outcome?

The importance of emotions in social creativity
Emotions are an integrated part of the motivational system (Buck, 1985; Darwin, 1872) which explain human behavior: performance, knowledge acquisition, as well as the ability to elaborate scenarios forward in time. Motivation, which is explained by the release of dopamine, is the driver of any behavior and is ignited by goal setting (Locke and Latham, 2002).

Goals affect performance by directing attention, mobilizing effort, increasing persistence, and motivating strategy development. Goal setting is most likely to improve task performance when the goals are specific and sufficiently challenging (Locke, Shaw, Saari & Latham, 1981).

This means that a leader can influence human performance, [generative] learning, and creative problem solving by his or her verbal communication. This process is facilitated when decisions about strategies are decentralized to the level of operations (Lord and Maher, 1991; McClelland and Rumelhart, 1985).

The model consists of a large number of simple processing elements which send excitatory and inhibitory signals to each other via modifiable connections. Information processing is thought of as the process whereby patterns of activation are formed over the units in the model through their excitatory and inhibitory interactcions (p. 159).

Organizational creativity
I define creativity to be the process of combining unrelated knowledge objects, or fragments of these objects, into new concepts. These concepts should be original and in some respect adaptable for a particular socio-cultural group (Simonton, 1999). This is illustrated by two examples.

First, testing scientific theories that others have presented cannot be considered original in a general sense, even though it can be original to some groups, and certainly adaptable.

Second, the inventions made during the ignition of the renaissance in Italy were both original and adaptable to people in Europe, even though these inventions most probably already had been made in China and were therefore no longer original to them (Menzies, 2008; Simonton, ibid.).

The processes of creativity are either intra- or interpersonal, but in both cases, creativity is taking place within a person’s brain & mind. 

Flaherty (2005) suggests a three-factor anatomical model for idea generation (and creative drive); parts of the neocortical structures like the temporal and frontal lobe are suggested to interact in this process with parts of the “older” (limbic) brain which holds responsibility for human emotions as well as motivational drive. This approach, that declarative or explicit memory instances co-operate, is common in theories associated with cognition, emotion, and motivation as well as in neuroscience.

The motivational and emotional impact on creativity
Motivation is a superordinate concept to emotions and helps people sustain attention and effort on a specific task or goal (Buck, 1985). Emotion, on the other hand, is a positive or negative mental response to a stimulus that also may be expressed physically, by heart rate or by facial expressions (Gazzaniga, 2002).

For example, we elevate the corners of our mouths when we are happy, or frowning our eyebrows when we experience discomfort (Österberg, 2001, in Swedish). According to Martindale (ibid.), a low level of emotional arousal (which is opposite to emotional tension) is associated with the ability to solve complex tasks where creativity and learning new things is demanded; high arousal levels provide an appropriate climate for simple tasks were familiar strategies will be applied. 

Imagine neuroticism from the “big five” personality assessment to understand emotional tension. Goleman (2007) suggests that with high emotional tension, the pathways to the hippocampi – the brain's central organs (there's two of them) for learning – are blocked, leaving us with the simple alternatives of flight or fight. Bechara and Bar-on (2006) argue that emotional intelligence – the multi-factorial array of interrelated emotional, personal, and social competencies that influence our ability to cope actively and effectively with daily demands – is closely related with Thorndike’s definition of social intelligence – the ability to perceive one’s own and other’s internal states, motives, and behaviors, and to act toward them optimally on the basis of that information. They further argue for the empirical evidence that discriminates emotional and social intelligence from “cold” cognition, which means humans can't be just rational; emotions are always involved. This means that inter-personal exchange processes, in complex problem solving, for example, demands more than just cognitive ability.

Leadership roles and the roles of mediators
There are several models in the framework of leadership – organizational behavior that emphasizes the importance for leaders to use a combination of roles to direct peoples’ attention as well as igniting individual qualities that will impact on the processes of solving the complex problem (Yukl, 2006). Some variables play a mediating role in the relationship between leadership and organizational behavior, to ignite motivational drive and relax emotional tension. Trust – the psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another - is one such example (Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt & Camerer, 1998). The concept varies between disciplines, and Isaksen and Ekvall (2006) associate trust with openness and defines these two merged concepts as the emotional safety in relationships displayed in an organization (with this definition, trust and openness is a part of the American version of Creative climate Questionnaire called Situational Outlook Questionnaire). From a creative point of view, trust in the leader plays an important role for people who tend to give suggestions that may be “outside the box.” Rousseau et al. (ibid) argue for a path-dependency between trust and risk; “risk creates an opportunity for trust, which leads to risk-taking” (p. 395).

Another leadership sub-ordinate mediator for performance is self-efficacy – the perception of one’s own work competence (Bandura, 1977; Locke and Latham, 2002). People who “sense” they have a good work competence will show better work performance compared to people who lack self-efficacy; when leaders assign challenging goals to a sub-ordinate or the whole organization for that matter, the receiver of the message gets the impression that the leader believes that the receiver has the ability to perform. The ten-dimensional scale called Creative Climate Questionnaire (CCQ; Ekvall, 1996) work in a similar way. The assessment includes factors that are associated with playfulness, leader’s openness towards debate, idea time, and trust. Ekvall and Ryhammar (1998) demonstrated that leaders may influence the creative outcome by working to improve the work climate that is, lower the emotional tension among employees, which could be interpreted as providing for relaxed and positive emotions within the organization.

The Osborne - Parnes approach to creativity (popularized through the brainstorming concept) emphasizes another important factor that may affect emotional tension among a problem-solving group: deferment of judgment. In this process, a person is assigned to facilitate the process - to keep up a good mood among the participants and to help them focus on idea generation. The purpose of deferment of judgment is to establish a positive climate where people feel safe to sustain an open mind for idea generation (Basadur, 2004). In general, it seems to be implicit factors like motivation and emotion that facilitate creative performance in a group or organization. People who are emotionally relaxed by the influence of work climate, and highly motivated by goal assignment will have no problem trying to think outside the box when demands are high.

The complexity of human learning and creativity
Descartes postulated a duality between mind and soul, but modern cognitive neuroscience has proven him wrong; to be able to make proper decisions and to act in a socially accepted way, thinking must be intertwined with emotional processing. Decision making, in general, constitutes the process of selecting and evaluating social and emotional information and this information must be relevant to a particular problem in order to generate possible solutions to that problem (Cacioppo and Berntson, 1992; Damasio, 1994; Gazzaniga et al., ibid.).

Our “emotional intelligence” helps us to understand who we are and how we interact with our environment. Emotions are what the outside observer can see or measure, whereas feelings are what the individual senses or experiences subjectively (Bechara and Bar-On, ibid.). This perspective goes back to Darwin who determined that humans have evolved a finite set of basic emotional states, each of which is unique in its adaptive significance and physiological expression. The proposals made by Darwin are that: 

• Emotion is based on activity in neurochemical systems in the central nervous system 
• these systems are the product of evolution and reflect survival requirements within each species 
• activity in these systems can be modified by learning (as referred to by Buck, 1985, p. 389).

Darwin stated the facial feedback hypothesis that suggests that emotions are expressed in a person's face. When we see people elevate the corner of their mouths (by activating a muscle called Zygomatic major), we interpret they feel comforted and will act friendly. This effect also works in the opposite direction, through feedback. This means that when people elevate the corner of their mouths they will feel comforted to a greater extent compared to displaying a neutral facial expression. This is also true for frowning. When people lower the inside of their eyebrows (with a muscle called Corrugator supercilii), they experience discomfort (Österberg, 2001).

Emotions are implicit which means they work in the background and are very hard to control directly. The parts of the brain which handle emotions evolved long before the areas for consciousness and cognition (Gazzaniga et al., ibid.). Further, some argue that affective judgment is independent of and occurs before cognition, which is consistent with Darwin’s approach to emotion, whereas some reject such an approach (Schacter and Singer, 1962).

The power of Motivation and Emotion
Buck (1985) argues for a meta-theory about emotion, based on three theoretical proposals starting with “prime” (primary motivational/emotional systems which are biologically based on an active inner process that requires external stimuli to reach expression. This theory span from psychophysiology to cognition and has been suggested in a variety of theories proposed by Darwin, James-Lange, Schachter and Singer, Ekman, and Panksepp.

It is not argued that any of these views are incorrect, rather that they are substantially correct as far as they go, but that they are incomplete and that it is possible to arrive at a comprehensive model of motivation and emotion by taking aspects of each of these views into account (Buck, 1985, p, 390).

PRIME:s are biological drives that work to energize behavior towards a fixed goal. The next level of affects in the motivational system are emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust (in Buck, 1985, referring to Ekman and Friesen, 1975, and Tomkins, 1962/32; Panksepp, 2000).

James-Lange theory of emotion (developed by William James and Carl Lange in parallel) suggests that our subjective experience of emotion is a response to our own bodily changes (we feel afraid because we run). The theory was supported by some studies, but rejected by others. According to most contemporary researchers though, bodily reactions alone cannot account for emotional experience (Gleitman et al., 1999).

Schachter and Singer (ibid.) proposed a two-factor theory (attribution of arousal theory or cognitive arousal theory) suggesting both physiological as well as cognitive influences to determine the emotional experience. Example: When a person runs into a barking dog, his or her reaction will probably be determined by the cognitive interpretation of that meeting (some cognition is suggested to take place, even though on an implicit level, in combination with direct physiological reactions). In our daily life, we may wake up from a dream with a smile on our face or shivering in a cold sweat from a nightmare. In a similar way, entering your manager’s office may cause your palms to sweat and your stomach may feel out of control. This physical reaction may also occur when you meet someone you feel physically attracted to. In either case, our heart will pound which is an emotional reaction. Decision making - the process of selecting and evaluating social and emotional information (Gazzaniga et al., ibid.) – then works to interpret the situation. These processes occur in parallel, meaning that you can't put one before the other. The impact of emotions has been popularized by Jonah Lehrer in a book called The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind. Lehrer points at two central anatomical areas in the brain to be responsible for decision making and corrections when your decisions are wrong. These are called the Orbitofrontal cortex (Kringelbach, 2005) and Anterior cingulate cortex (Pardo, Pardo, Janer & Raichle, 1990). Even though many different areas in the brain are involved in decision making, the orbitofrontal cortex seems to be particularly important. Damasio (2005) argue that there are several factors at play in decision making (e.g. to explain why rationality fails):

I see some failures of rationality as not just due to a primary calculation weakness, but also due to the influence of biological drives such as obedience, conformity, the desire to preserve self-esteem, which is often manifested as emotions and feelings (p. 191).

Damasio mentions as an example people's fear of flying over car driving, even though the rational calculation of risk “unequivocally demonstrates that” (as he puts it) the probability to survive a flight between two cities, compared to driving a car between the same cities.

Facial expressions are displayed to inform people and other creatures in your environment of your current emotional state and also your intentions. Numerous examples are given about how salesmen, politicians, and news-readers consciously influence their counterparts by manipulating their facial expressions. Paul Ekman and his colleagues discovered that the expressions by themselves were sufficient to feedback significant changes in a person’s autonomic nervous system. This feedback phenomenon was tested in an experimental set up where respondents were asked to elevate the corners of their mouth when watching pictures of faces and neutral landscapes, and then what was thought to be the opposite: lowering their eyebrows in another round watching the same pictures. The result demonstrated a significant effect of facial expressions. This means that the respondents’ emotions changed by the way they consciously manipulated their facial muscles.

Emotion and facial expression are also related the opposite way; emotions cause involuntary facial expressions, like in the case of Mary the housewife whose attempt to commit suicide forced her to lie to the treating therapists, and they were all fooled by the lie (Ekman, 2001). The sessions with Mary was filmed for other purposes but when Ekman was told about her story he went back to analyze what had happened; in brief, he and his colleague Friesen identified what they called micro-expressions which are very hard-to-identify involuntary facial movements induced by emotions; Mary was weighted down by despair because she felt life no longer had any value, and this, according to Ekman, was briefly displayed in her face. So even though she verbally had lied about her intention for the therapist, her true emotions were revealed by her face.

Our emotional personality seems to be situated in the prefrontal cortex; studies of monkeys where this area had been dislocated showed no emotional life. The monkeys became crippled in a social sense, even losing their sexual ability, and were finally pushed away by the other monkeys in the group to die in loneliness. The same holds for humans. Emotional expressions that are typical for a person are correlated with the prefrontal cortex or at least parts of it. In the cases of Phineas Gage and Elliot (for reading in-depth, please consult Antonio Damasio’s Descartes error), both persons lost their “personality” (or emotional self) as the lower or upper region of the prefrontal cortex was damaged. They both seemed to keep their intelligence intact, but lost personality traits associated with an emotional self; they also lacked the ability to be creative. Lacking the ability to sense or imagine emotional risk is devastating in decision making, reason, and rational thinking, which are controlled by somatic markers – the emotional association in cognitive processing which causes affective displays; for example “gut feeling” (Eriksson, 2001).

Emotions, prediction and intervening effect
Emotions are also depending on goals and actions (which is consistent with the work by Locke and Latham whose legendary goal-setting theory has been proven to ignite motivation which, according to Buck, 1985, is super ordinate to emotion).

Emotions seem to mediate most of the social interactions people have with one another; when we meet a person our brain works in the background with information perceived through eyes, ears, and nose, and sometimes even projected through tactile responses. The pitch of someone’s voice, or the way they smell, is of great importance for how we judge a person.

Numerous taxonomies for emotions have been proposed, but no definite classification exists. Even so, love, joy, satisfaction, grief, jealousy, and anger, are six examples of general emotions (Gleitman et al., ibid., p. 470). At least six different facial affective expressions - happiness, fearfulness, disgust, sadness, anger, being surprised - are said to illustrate the basic emotions common to everyone in the world (Ekman and Friesen, 1975, in Buck, 1985).

Tomkins suggests that affect can be positive, negative, or neutral; surprise – startle does not come with either negative or positive value but will clear our mind from anything we were paying attention to at the moment. This emotional state may be the most interesting of them all and it seems to correspond to one part of the concept of goal setting, in the sense presented by Locke and Latham (ibid.).

For goal setting to be effective, a challenge must be a part of the concept, because the purpose with the goal is to steal attention from something else going on at the moment or to change the traditional way of thinking. Litchfield (2008) reminds us of the original intention of brainstorming: to ignite motivation to be creative by assigning a challenging goal. This may be interpreted as causing people to feel startled or surprised – clearing their minds for a brief moment. For example, when John F Kennedy assigned the put-a-man-on-the-moon objective to the American people, or when Barack Obama assigned the We-are-leaving-Iraq objective, people, in general, must have been a little startled. (It’s hard to research on the matter in retrospect, but possible to reflect on).

Challenges can come out of the blue as well, like in a crisis situation. Suddenly, control is lost and there is a demand for hasty and brave decisions. These are situations when knowledge about how to solve a problem is absent - when creativity is called upon. These types of problems are referred to as complex (Duncker, 1945; Wood & Locke, 1990). One famous example of complex problem solving was the invention of a carbon dioxide filter to the space shuttle of the Apollo 13 expedition 1970. (In the movie, one of the leaders holds up two artifacts, a cylinder and a cube in front of the group assigned to solve the problem, stating: The mission can be described as “to put this into that”, referring to the process of adding two disparate objects into one another.)

A surprise does not last for long; when a goal is internalized by people in the organization, questions will be asked about how to attain the goal when knowledge to do so is not present. A climate or communications architecture for creative thinking (Ekvall, ibid.; Österberg, 2004), will influence peoples’ self-efficacy (Bandura, ibid.) to attain the goal in a self-regulating manner, and in the end, provide for a solution.

The Apollo example again: there is now both a current state and a goal state, and a group of people who pays attention to a very serious situation. Within a few hours, a filter must be invented from the items (preinventive structures; Finke, Ward & Smith, 1992) in the shuttle, in order to clear the air for the crew within. The group of problem solvers is left alone in a room, which indicates a situation where the goal attainment process is decentralized, that is, the executive functions are lowered to the level of operations. The problem solvers' job is to exchange knowledge with each other and to construct an emergent structure that did not exist before (in the sense described by Finke, 1996). This means that the motivational drive must be high and the emotional tension low or relaxed.

It is suggested that a process like this may be supported by the cyclic or interactive release of dopamine from the hippocampus to the structures of the substantia nigra (SN) and ventral tegmental area (VTA), as a response to novelty to promote idea generation (Fenker & Schütze, 2008). When we experience something new in a familiar context, the brain seems to go into a rewarding mood (support generative learning), and this, in turn, will feedback by sending dopamine to the hippocampus. As it seems, when we are influenced by the reward system, we also become open to idea generation. People working to solve the carbon-dioxide problem were probably ignited by the startling assignment to do the impossible, and with this challenging goal, motivation kicked in to drive the goal attainment process. Some will argue that these people probably also felt fear and anger, to fail, and because the stupid shuttle failed to work properly. I will argue that their focus of attention excluded such emotion during this process, caused by situational factors like leadership style, climate, and so forth.

If negative emotions associated with failure and anger would have dominated, the production of cortisol would have impaired the hippocampus from administrating generative learning/creativity in favor of the amygdala, facilitating the thought that it will never be possible to put “this into that.” When we feel threatened or upset, we tend to avoid novel ways of thinking and instead stick with solutions that we know have been applied before but not necessarily with a successful outcome. Thin slicing – decision making through instant emotional reactions.

Thin slicing – decision making through instant emotional reactions
There are indications that implicit processing like emotion plays an important role in human functioning and social interaction. Emotions take part in the loop for reasoning, supporting the process, rather than disturbing it (Damasio, 2005, p. xi). Thus, emotions are supporters of human thinking and action, not substitutes. Emotion may, as Damasio puts it:

increase the saliency of a premise, and in so doing, bias the conclusion in favor to the premise (p. xii).

Damasio refers to one of the introductory chapters in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. A curator at the Getty museum decides to authenticate a Greek sculpture with the purpose of buying it, based on reason alone, and also, on how to predict sustainable relations among married people. Gladwell is lining up numerous examples of human action where implicit processes of emotion play a remarkable important role for the decisions made by the characters in the stories; the curators a the Getty museum, who by using his “gut feeling” in an instant could decide that something was wrong with the sculpture, initiate an investigation instead of buying it (This supports the conception about emotion as being implicit). Another case is the theory of thin-slicing (Carrere & Gottman, 1999) which was used as coding devices (SPAFF – specific affect) to identify emotions based on facial expressions. SPAFF was applied to married couples during conversation and the conversation itself was video-taped. Next, the videotaped conversation was “sliced-down” to minutes. The conclusion of this maneuver is that by watching three minutes of couples’ conversation, it is possible to predict who will stay together and who will be divorced. The result supports the theory of thin-slicing – “the ability for our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience” (Gladwell, 2005, p. 23). Gottman was looking for facial expressions that people seldom take notice of on a conscious level (compare Paul Ekman’s micro-expressions), but that the brain seems to code anyway. Emotional expressions do accompany common verbalized expressions, by bringing additional meaning to the message. And this is common to us all; we say something, but adding a specific tone and/or facial expression or bodily posture, then the meaning of the message turns out to be different. Gladwell gives another example of how this can be used. During World War II it turned out to be possible to identify the sender of Morse code by his “fist”, which is the specific way someone is hitting the keypad; depending on the ways the keypad it hit, it was also possible to interpret the urgency of a message. It was then possible to locate a specific Morse coder by triangulating the radio signal. All in all, it was possible to calculate and conclude what kind of problem they had encountered and the coders’ whereabouts. Gottman argues that the relationship between people also has a “fist” and therefore it can be read and decoded. Fists are like micro-expressions that can be read on a conscious level.

Gladwell also portraits Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991), author of Affect, Imagery, and consciousness, as well as the teacher of Paul Ekman, the pioneering researcher on the relation between emotion and facial expressions. Tomkins (influenced by Darwin) thought that faces, both human and animal, held information about the subjects emotions and motives; He also believed, contrary to conventional knowledge at that time, that faces were governed by a common set of rules; he proved himself to be right by discriminate sweet and kindness from violence and aggression, by studying a film of tribes from Papua New Guinea, which eventually ignited Paul Ekman's quest for understanding the relationship between emotions and facial expressions (Gladwell, 2005).

Emotions are the key to most of the intra- and interpersonal activities people engage in; what happens inside of us influence what happens when we encounter subjects and objects in our environment.

Pure rational thinking without any emotional or social support leads to bad adjustment. Sometimes to catastrophe (Eriksson, ibid., p. 34).

Conclusions
The conclusion made from this paper is that emotion plays a crucial role in learning and idea generation as well as to be crucial for decision making; emotions can be interpreted by others as well as triggered by leaders. An emergent thought that came during the process of writing this paper was the two-factor approach common to many models of psychology (in leadership, decision making, cognition, and so forth). Most models concerning human behavior seem to involve things that can be verbalized and things that cannot; conscious and unconscious thoughts seem to be present at every aspect of human thinking. In Locke and Latham’s Goal-setting theory (1990, 2002) challenging symbolic representation, either by imagery or by leadership assignment, triggers motivation which in turn explains the behavior. The challenge triggers an impulse to explore (Fenker & Schutze, 2008). Schachter and Singer (1962) suggest cognition and physiology work together to establish the emotional experience. I try to address this in my dual role model for leadership - Generative learning management (Österberg, 2004).

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