The interactive effect of integral and incidental emotions on creative metaphor performance

Prior research on the relationship between emotion and creativity has mostly focused on the influence of incidental emotions on creative performance. The present study aimed to explore how incidental and integral emotions interact to influence the generation of creative metaphors from the perspective of the affect priming theory. In the study, we applied video clips to induce participants’ positive or negative incidental emotions while selecting metaphors that ask participants to describe personal emotional experiences with positive or negative valence to manipulate integral emotions. Participants generated several metaphors immediately after watching the video clips. The study found that participants who watched happy (sad) videos generated the most creative metaphors when expressing positive (negative) emotional experiences, which suggests that integral and incidental emotions interact to influence the generation of creative metaphors through the emotion congruency effect. The results are further discussed from the perspective of affect priming theory.