中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: The purposes of this study were to explore the effect of multiple semantic thinking and funniness on creative performance, and the mediation by the activation of the right hemisphere. Methods & Results: In Study 1, 48 Taiwanese participants (mean age=20.6 years) rated the degree of funniness and the creativity of 6 jokes they read. Analysis showed a high correlation between perceived funniness and perceived creativity. In Study 2, 78 Taiwanese participants (mean age=21.1 years) were assigned to 4 conditions: 1) joke reading, 2) multiple semantic thinking (to prime flexible thinking), 3) funny memory recall, and 4) a control group. Afterwards they completed a set of insight problems that tested participants on their ability to shift perspective. Compared to the control group, the multiple semantic thinking group did not perform as well on the insight problems, but the jokereading group performed better. In Study 3, 60 participants (mean age=20.3 years) were asked to rate 6 jokes or a funny film by degree of funniness. Analysis of the ratings showed that beyond a certain point of funniness, there was no improvement in performance on the insight problem. In Study 4, 37 participants (mean age=21.5 years) were asked to read jokes and to complete a line-bisection task (to gague the activation of the right hemisphere). A tendency for activation of the right hemisphere mediated between funniness and creative performance as measured by the insight problem. Conclusions: The results demonstrated that 1) funniness and creativity are highly correlated, 2) the funniness of humor stimuli can enhance creative performance, 3) when humor stimuli were rated at a mid-level of funniness, they increased performance on the insight task, and 4) the activation of the right hemisphere mediated between funniness and creative performance.