Emotions are some of the most discussed aspects of the experience of art, and it has even been argued that emotions are synonymous with art. This chapter will delve into how art simultaneously conveys and evokes emotions, a feature that helps to distinguish the experience of art from experiences in other areas of life. The chapter will also discuss the developments in research methodologies and trends in the scientific study of art that have brought our understanding of art from being based mainly on anecdotal evidence to being empirically-founded. The longstanding issues associated with emotions and art, as well as present state-of-the-art research on the role of emotions in aesthetic experiences, will also be presented. Finally, the chapter will identify some of the questions and challenges for future research in emotions and art.

This chapter explores the relationships between attention, affect, and creativity, including a discussion of creativity in the context of mindfulness and mind-wandering. First, we discuss the effects of different forms of attention on different types of creativity, such as divergent and convergent thinking, and real-world creative achievements. We then follow with a discussion of the relationship between creativity, emotional functioning, and the power of positivity on fostering creative ideas. The chapter concludes with a review on how mindfulness meditation and mind-wandering, both separately and jointly, impact creative thinking. This includes a discussion of the effects of different types of mindfulness meditation on creativity, as well as the core facets thought to constitute mindfulness. Overall, this chapter provides an engaging overview of the various attentional and emotional states thought to be implicated in creativity, as well as an intriguing look at how mindfulness and mind-wandering work independently and in tandem to influence creative thinking.

Multimedia communication design is a form of complex problem-solving. It requires heuristics which take into account addressees’ cognitive abilities and prior knowledge, the complexity of the subject matter, processing conditions, time limits, and other factors. Multimedia designers have to be aware of the asymmetry between texts and pictures in terms of representational principles and communication functions, including the fact that texts and pictures compensate for their inherent ambiguities by reciprocal disambiguation. Designers have to be further aware that multimedia comprehension starts with initial mental model construction primarily guided by the text, which is then followed by adaptive mental model specification primarily guided by the picture for specific task requirements. Text design should enable smooth continuous coherence formation within the right text modality. Picture design should enable scaffolding for mental model construction and visualize the essential structure of a subject matter with regard to future tasks. Above all, multimedia design needs to adequately synchronize the different comprehension processes.

Case study method is a crucial research tool that works in dialogue with other methodologies to identify the real-world challenges of creative work. Whereas most psychological methodologies isolate variables or measure their relative importance in predicting what is likely to happen across a population, case studies attempt to understand the systemic complexity of specific instances, describing how things can happen in order to consider why. Cases can elaborate on findings from other research, offer caveats to those findings, or raise new research questions. Affect, an important topic that both draws on researchers’ insights and tests their perspectives, exemplifies the data that case work is adept at recognizing and can offer to such a dialogue. This chapter discusses how case research can examine affect and provides examples from research on creative work using the evolving systems and participatory framework approaches. Five guiding questions are provided to help researchers integrate analyses of affect into case studies and situate those findings in relation to other research. These questions address the researcher’s philosophical stance, the possibilities and limits of a given case, the functions of affect within the case, patterns in affective systems, and the potential for both insight and bias.

Effective leadership of creative people and efforts is more essential than ever, given the dynamic nature of many organizations today. Technology advances, automation, virtual work, and other workplace changes require creativity and innovation from both leaders and employees. Leaders play a critical role in fostering creativity and innovation. While a variety of attributes and capabilities have been linked to leading for creativity and innovation, less is known about the role of emotions and emotion capabilities in how leadership connects to creativity and innovation. Leader emotional displays, knowledge of emotions, and ability to recognize and regulate emotion in themselves and others have the potential to substantially influence creative work activities. This chapter explores the intersection of leadership, emotions, creativity, and innovation. Drawing on key theories and research, several questions will be examined. What is the nature of creative work and what is required from leaders to support creativity? Why are emotions important in creativity? What roles do leader emotions, traits, and displays play in fostering or hindering creativity? How does emotion regulation facilitate leader and employee creativity? What emotion preferences, skills and capabilities have been associated with different leadership styles? Challenges and theoretical implications are discussed.

While researchers have established that affective states play a large role in individual creativity, the relationship between affect and collective creativity is not well understood. This oversight is meaningful as, particularly in organizations, creativity is often the result of collective action. We review and integrate work on how positive and negative affective climate and discrete emotional climates impact creativity at work. Then, we propose a new definition of affective climate and four future directions for the field. First, higher-level affective states should be treated as more than manifestations of their individual-level analogs. Second, a focus on shared homogenous affect has precluded work on more complex, heterogeneous affective climates, which future work should study. Third, there is a lack of work on top-down drivers of collective affect, partially produced by a lack of work on collective affect at levels higher than the team. Fourth, more work on discrete collective affect, including social emotional climates (e.g., love, pride, envy), is needed since such work allows for the development of higher-level theory based on social perceptions, relationships, and interactions. We hope our review helps researchers address these gaps and produce a more nuanced understanding of how affective climate influences collective creativity.

In future, an increasing number of people will need to learn continuously in order to orient themselves in the quickly changing world around them. Multimedia communication and multimedia comprehension will be key elements of their learning. Accordingly, it is very important to have a sufficiently deep understanding of the psychological processes behind multimedia comprehension. This understanding should be rooted in theory-driven empirical research about the cognitive processing of multiple representations, particularly of texts and pictures. It should also allow practice-oriented basic recommendations to be derived for the design and usage of multimedia. These recommendations should go beyond everyday knowledge, practical experience, intuition, and the use of seemingly professional surface features. Design of multimedia communication has to be based on sufficiently deep knowledge about the psychological processes involved in comprehension and knowledge construction. Practitioners need to receive scientific support for them to better understand the laws of perception and cognitive processing underlying comprehension and knowledge acquisition.

Although recent research has begun examining the construct more widely, there exist several gaps in scholarship. One such area is the influence, association, and role of affective factors in determining whether and to what extent an entity engages in dark creativity. After introducing concepts like negative and malevolent creativity, this chapter reviews the existing literature on the link between affective factors and creativity. Thereafter, the features of dark personality traits, like psychopathy, are examined with reference to affective considerations such as low empathy in producing original harm. Owing to the relationship between dark creativity and moral concerns, we also examine how moral emotions like guilt and shame (or lack thereof) may contribute to an understanding of such creativity. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research and avenues for interdisciplinary studies.

Diversifying experiences, defined as “unusual and unexpected events or situations that push people outside the realm of normality”, include a wide range of experiences, both negative and positive, which reflect difference and uncertainty. We argue that successfully managing diversifying experiences at the individual level may foster creativity. Thus, we will use the diversifying experiences and creativity framework to present empirical evidence and theoretical arguments that illustrate the link between managing uncertainty/difference and creativity. First, we will present empirical evidence for the link between four broad categories of diversifying experiences and creativity: psychopathology, adversity, enrichment, and diversity. Second, we will discuss the possible mechanism of managing such experiences (at the individual level) in a way that fosters creativity. Third, we will discuss future directions.

Pictures are two-dimensional depictive representations. They include static pictures and animations. The latter are defined as pictorial displays that change their structure or other features over time and trigger perception of a continuous change. Static and animated pictures can display static as well as dynamic content. Both can have an envisioning, explanatory, orientation, organizing, and argumentative function. Picture comprehension entails sub-semantic perceptual processing, semantic perceptual processing, and conceptual processing. Sub-semantic perceptual processing is primarily pre-attentive and data-driven. It results in viewer-cantered and object-cantered visual representations. Semantic perceptual processing is attentive and data- as well as knowledge-driven. It results in object or event recognition. Conceptual processing is attentive and primarily knowledge-driven. It creates complex propositional structures and mental models in working memory. Picture comprehension is based on analog structure mapping under the guidance of perceptual and conceptual representations.