Four experiments indicated that positive affect, induced by means of seeing a few minutes of a comedy film or by means of receiving a small bag of candy, improved performance on two tasks that are generally regarded as requiring creative ingenuity: Duncker's (1945) candle task and M. T. Mednick, S. A. Mednick, and E. V. Mednick's (1964) Remote Associates Test. One condition in which negative affect was induced and two in which subjects engaged in physical exercise (intended to represent atfectless arousal) failed to produce comparable improvements in creative performance. The influence of positive affect on creativity was discussed in terms of a broader theory of the impact of positive affect on cognitive organization. Recent research has suggested that positive affect can influence the way cognitive material is organized and thus may influence creativity. Studies using three types of tasks (typicality rating, sorting, and word association) indicated that persons in whom positive affect had been induced differed from those in control conditions in the associations that they gave to common, neutral words (Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robinson, 1985) and in the pattern and degree of relatedness that they depicted among stimulus elements (Isen & Daubman, 1984). It has been suggested that these differences are due to differences between the groups in the tendency to relate and integrate divergent material. This process of bringing together apparently disparate material in a useful or reasonable but unaccustomed way is central to most current conceptualizations of the creative process (e.g., Koestler, 1964; S. A. Mednick, 1962). Thus, it seems likely that positive affect may promote creativity.

Positive affect systematically influences performance on many cognitive tasks. A new neuropsychological theory is proposed that accounts for many of these effects by assuming that positive affect is associated with increased brain dopamine levels. The theory predicts or accounts for influences of positive affect on olfaction, the consolidation of long-term (i.e., episodic) memories, working memory, and creative problem solving. For example, the theory assumes that creative problem solving is improved, in part, because increased dopamine release in the anterior cingulate improves cognitive flexibility and facilitates the selection of cognitive perspective.

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Three studies and a pilot experiment showed that positive affect, induced in any of three ways, influenced categorization of either of two types of stimuli-words or colors. As reflected by performance on two types of tasks (rating and sorting), people in whom positive affect had been induced tended to create and use categories more inclusively than did subjects in a control condition. On one task, they tended to group more stimuli together, and on the other task they tended to rate more low-prototypic exemplars of a category as members of the category. These results are interpreted in terms of an influence of affect on cognitive organization or on processes that might influence cognitive organization. It is suggested that borderline effects of negative affect on categorization, obtained in two of the studies, might result from normal people's attempts to cope with negative affect.

Two studies investigated the effect of good mood on cognitive processes. In the first study, conducted in a shopping mall, a positive feeling state was induced by giving subjects a free gift, and good mood, thus induced, was found to improve subjects' evaluations of the performance and service records of products they owned. In the second study, in which affect was induced by having subjects win or lose a computer game in a laboratory setting, subjects who had won the game were found to be better able to recall positive material in memory. The results of the two studies are discussed in terms of the effect that feelings have on accessibility of cognitions. In addition, the nature of affect and the relationship between good mood and behavior (such as helping) are discussed in terms of this proposed cognitive process.Recent work on the relationship between good mood and helping has begun to focus on the nature of that relationship-on why andThe authors wish to thank Fred Polner for his assistance in conducting Study 1 and Aron Siegman and Tom Trabasso for their comments on the manuscript.Margaret Clark is now at Carnegie-Mellon University.Requests for reprints should be sent to Alice M. Isen,