Outgoing people in a good mood are significantly more creative than people who keep themselves to themselves, according to a new study. University of Portsmouth psychologist Lorenzo Stafford discovered that extrovert people in a good mood are the most creative thinkers because they have more of the “happiness chemical” dopamine. Introverts are no more creative whether they are in a good or neutral mood, the study found.
Dr Stafford said his results showed personality and mood play a vital role in creativity. Extroverts are likely to be more successful because a higher than average level of the chemical floods the brain at even higher doses when a person is in a good mood, according to Dr Stafford. “The more outgoing a person is, the more active their dopamine system is and a positive mood increases dopamine activity even further in many parts of the brain,” he explained. “It’s effectively a combination of these two things I would suggest leads to greater activity in certain areas of the brain controlling mental ability. “This is interesting in itself because it demonstrates that it is the combination of the extrovert personality-type in a positive mood which encourages more creative performance, and not simply positive mood alone.”
Dopamine occurs naturally in the brain and affects a range of behaviour including mood, sleep, reward, learning and movement.
Read more at Sunday Mercury (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
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Interesting findings, though can this be remedied for the introverts by actively trying to ‘enjoy things more’?
Also, while creativity appears scientifically connected to extroverts at greater levels (where this sentence came from at 8:34am on a Saturday after THAT Friday I’ll never know…), how comes unhappy folk make such great comedians?
Discuss
All creative people I know are introverts so I call BS.
…….or is it that creative people are more happy?
Interesting…I can see the logic in it, but considering that a good few creative geniuses throughout history have been depressed or thought of as social pariahs, I’m not sure I buy this totally…
Can well believe it. When you’re in a low mood, your mind is too full of negative crap to even get to the good stuff. I wonder if there are natural and effective measures you can take to increase dopamine to create a positive level of thinking in your brain. Wouldn’t that be great for all of us???
All the creative people I know are either always miserable or bipolar. So how can you get creative people to be more happy?
Some happy people think they are creative but they’re just happy.
Be careful when reading someone’s opinion of scientific results – they can be easily misread. The conclusions in this article may very well be so, because in my experience the happy-go-lucky characters described above are usually uncreative, while the depressives seem to be highly creative. It could be that naturally creative people simply don’t need dopamine to do their thing, while those not so able need to get high first.
I’m gunna lead towards believing this partly. I don’t think “In my experience” produces scientifically significant results. Remember that the results are a general trend over a large group of people. There are going to be people that go against the rule. There’s a trend, within the comments, that suggests that the opposite of the experiment results is true. I imagine this is due to the fact that only people that have conflicting experiences feel the need to comment. Everyone else thinks “yea that sounds about right” and moves on to the next web page.
I know methods that can change an introvert to an extrovert (takes a lot of work) and an extrovert to an introvert (takes only a blink of an eye). They’re the same methods that can convert optimists into pessimists, and they can be summarized like this: To get one from negative to positive, you need to provide care, understanding, help, step by step guidance, and continuous support (the job is almost never done). To get one from positive to negative, criticize him a lot, beat him to a pulp, punish him for no reason, accuse him of being wrong when he defends himself, pretend that he’s hurting your feelings when he defends himself, say that his friends only want him to suffer and you are the only person who wants him to be happy (this job is never done either). -
if you look more deeply into this research the sample was 86 people and creativity was measured by how well they performed in ‘creativity tasks’?
It’s not a measure of individual genius or a reflection of what is considered by the wider society as being of creative merit.
Sunday painters are no doubt very happy but they generally suck in terms of creativity.
I buy this. It particularly explains increased creativity in people with bipolar. I have bipolar and paint, make jewellery, draw,and make models (sometimes at the same time when I am manic – lol) but seriously mania is beyond. Happy and I use my hobbies to help me lift my mood
Extroverts in a good mood have the kind of creativity that has given us an economy filled with call-centres. If you want spin or great adverts for stupid products hire a happy extrovert. The view of creativity here is truly sad.
Students at the University of Portsmouth are getting into debt for this?
I dont think some people would be introverts if they weren’t so creative.
Sometimes their creativity/projects/ artworks (whatever it is they are doing) causes them to be introversive because they are so consumed by it.
I’ll have to agree with several others and say I dont buy this study. I just can’t see it as being universally true, that in general happy people are more creative.