A new study published in the journal PLoS ONE has found that listening to ‘happy music’ (i.e. classical music that elicits positive mood and is high on arousal) is associated with an increase in divergent creative thinking.
According to the team, music listening can be easily integrated into daily life and may provide an innovative means to facilitate creative cognition in an efficient way in various scientific, educational and organizational settings when creative thinking is needed. Image credit: Gerd Altmann.
Creativity is the driving force behind scientific, technological and cultural innovation, and it can be considered one of the key competences for the 21st century. It is usually defined as the generation of ideas, insights, or problem solutions that are original and meant to be useful.
The question of what facilitates creative cognition has long been studied, and while music has previously been shown to benefit cognition, little is known about how listening to music affects creative cognition specifically.
To investigate the effect of music on creative cognition, Radboud University researcher Dr. Simone Ritter and Dr. Sam Ferguson from the University of Technology Sydney had 155 participants complete questionnaires and split them into experimental groups.
Each group listened to one of four different types of music that were categorized as calm, happy, sad, or anxious, depending on their emotional valence (positive, negative) and arousal (high, low), while one control group listened to silence.
After the music started playing, participants performed various cognitive tasks that tested their divergent and convergent creative thinking.
Participants who came up with the most original and useful solutions to a task scored higher in divergent creativity, while participants who came up with the single best possible solution to a task scored higher in convergent creativity.
The authors found that listening to happy music facilitates more divergent creative thinking compared to silence.
They suggest that the variables involved in the happy music condition may enhance flexibility in thinking, so that additional solutions might be considered by the participant that may not have occurred to them as readily if they were performing the task in silence.
“Our study shows that creative cognition may be enhanced through music, and further research could explore how different ambient sounds might affect creativity and include participants of diverse cultures, age groups, and levels of music experience,” the researchers said.
“The study may also demonstrate that music listening could promote creative thinking in inexpensive and efficient ways in various scientific, educational and organizational settings.”
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S.M. Ritter & S. Ferguson. 2017. Happy creativity: Listening to happy music facilitates divergent thinking. PLoS ONE 12 (9): e0182210; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182210
