Creativity has become a popular research area because it is strongly associated with productivity ,? says Geneviève Beaulieu-Pelletier, a doctoral student at the University of Montreal (Canada). According to Beaulie-Pelletier, people face difficult situations every day, from "the death of a loved one to choosing between various college majors, watching images of violence and poverty on television, or disagreeing with a friend." "All these conflicts involve an expenditure of emotional cognitive energy and I wanted to find out if creativity could help to cope with negative emotions," he adds.
To check, Beaulie-Pelletier showed 160 university students or na ambiguous image that evokes loss and depression. Subjects had to make up as many stories as possible to explain the image. The experiments revealed that those who allowed themselves to be overcome by the sadness that the image evoked were also those who made up fewer stories, from which it could be deduced that creativity allows better handling of situations that involve negative feelings and emotions.
