Spillover Effects in Creative Thinking: The Impact of Gaming and Mathematics on Creativity and Emotions

As automation advances and markets transform, creative skills are becoming increasingly important. In the present study (N = 813), we therefore investigate how creative performance can be enhanced. Participants either participated in a fun recreational game, a fun-focused game, a math task, or none (control condition). This allowed us to analyze the impact of tasks that elicit positive emotions due to their fun nature and more stressful tasks, such as math, on later creative task performance. Contrary to our predictions, prior engagement in joyful or arithmetic tasks did not notably affect creativity, indicating a multifaceted relation among task categories, creativity metrics, and task-switching. Exploratory analyses revealed that fluency, but not originality and convergent thinking, was positively associated with creative self-efficacy and growth mindset and negatively with fixed mindset. The sequence in which divergent and convergent thinking tasks were presented affected originality but not fluency. In summary, our research underlines the intricacies of task categories, individual differences, and creative performance. Implications for creative enhancement methods across diverse contexts are discussed.