The Physiological Response During Divergent Thinking

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Author
Loudon, Gareth
Deininger, Gina
Date
2016-01-22Acceptance date
2016-01-19
Type
Article
ISSN
2160-5874
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Our research studied the physiological response of participants during a creative task to investi-gate if a person’s psychophysiological state is correlated with divergent thinking performance. We used heart rate variability as our physiological measure. We asked 50 participants to perform a cognitive task that assessed their divergent thinking skills and recorded their heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) before and during the task. Frequency domain analysis was performed on the HRV. The results showed that there was a significant negative correlation between log-transformed low frequency HRV power and the number of ‘divergent thinking’ words gener-ated. Our results suggest that a person’s psychophysiological state is correlated with their diver-gent thinking performance, and that attention and motivation might be important factors, howev-er this needs further research. Our findings also suggest that being in a relaxed state before the start of a creative task is not a predictor of creative performance.
Journal/conference proceeding
Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science;
Citation
Loudon, G. and Deininger, G. (2016) 'The Physiological Response during Divergent Thinking', Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science, 6, pp. 28-37.
Description
This article has been published in Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science, available open access at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/jbbs.2016.61004
Rights
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Collections
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