How Anger Inspires Creativity For Some | Tom Jacobs
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 08:34PM Countless ideas have been offered to help stimulate one’s creativity. Daydream. Brainstorm with others. Follow your intuition. Or simply sit passively as someone speaks to you in an angry tone of voice. Oddly enough, the latter approach appears to work, at least for certain people. That’s the conclusion of a new study from the Netherlands. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a research team led by University of Amsterdam psychologist Gerben Van Kleef describes an experiment involving 63 undergraduates. To begin, each filled out an 11-item “personal need for structure scale,” in which they rate the degree to which they agreed with such statements as “I become uncomfortable when the rules in a situation are not clear.”