Being happy boosts creativity

Generally,positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking, says Ruby Nadler,a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario.

For this study,Nadler and her colleagues Rahel Rabi and John Paul Minda looked at a particular kind of learning that is improved by creative thinking. Students who took part in the study were put into different moods and then given a category learning task to do they learned to classify sets of pictures with visually complex patterns.

The researchers manipulated mood with help from music clips and video clips; first,they tried several out to find out what made people happiest and saddest.

The happiest music was a peppy Mozart piece,and the happiest video was of a laughing baby. The researchers then used these in the experiment,along with sad music and video a piece of music from Schindlers List and a news report about an earthquake and a piece of music and a video that didnt affect mood.

After listening to the music and watching the video,people had to try to learn to recognize a pattern.

Happy volunteers were better at learning a rule to classify the patterns than sad or neutral volunteers. If you have a project where you want to think innovatively,or you have a problem to carefully consider,being in a positive mood can help you to do that, Nadler says.

And music is an easy way to get into a good mood. Everyone has a different type of music that works for themdont feel like you have to switch to Mozart,she says.

The study has been published in Psychological Science,a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.