Reappraising Emotional Events Facilitates Creativity

Research on the relationship between emotional experience and creativity has burgeoned in the past few decades. However, little is known about how emotion regulation may affect creativity. The current paper focuses on a specific emotion regulation strategy: cognitive reappraisal. Building on the process model of emotion regulation and the creative cognition approach, we hypothesize that cognitive reappraisal can facilitate creativity because it promotes set-breaking and conceptual reconstructing. Furthermore, we borrow insights from the interactionist approach to creativity and investigate the interactive effects of cognitive reappraisal and openness to experience. Four studies show that the habitual tendency to use cognitive reappraisal is positively associated with creativity. Also, practice with cognitive reappraisal can enhance creativity for people with low openness to experience. Overall, the current work extends the literature on emotions and creativity by demonstrating that the way individuals regulate their emotions is consequential for their creativity. More broadly, it indicates that emotion regulation processes have downstream consequences on cognition that are independent from their effects on emotional experiences.