You’re amazing! More creative, too

If you’re an employer (especially if you’re my employer), I want you to go out right now and buy a box of chocolates for your staff. Then while you’re handing them out, why not make a point of letting everyone know just how good they’re looking today?

Just so long as your staff weren’t expecting it, you’d most likely see that their work was significantly better today – that they seemed more attentive and focused, and could come up with more creative solutions than usual. Pretty cool, huh?

Isen’s study

That’s what Alice Isen from Cornell University showed in a study of how positive affect (or emotion) influences clinical problem solving (Isen, Rosenzweig & Young, 1991). In the study, two groups of third year medical students were taken through a diagnosis problem where they had to decide which one of six hypothetical patients was most likely to be suffering from lung cancer. However, positive affect had been induced in one group first by telling them that they had successfully solved an anagram problem.

What Isen found was that even though both groups reached the same conclusions, the happy group reached their conclusions significantly more quickly than the control group. And the only difference between the two groups was their state of mind!

So what was going on?

The importance of dopamine

When you receive an unexpected reward, several different parts of your brain start releasing a chemical called dopamine, which is renowned for its many effects on how we think and feel. In fact, many drugs like cocaine, and to a lesser extent nicotine and alcohol, work largely by flooding the brain with dopamine. But as Ashby, Isen and Turken (1999) discuss, dopamine also has a very positive influence on our ability to think creatively and solve problems.

Dopamine facilitates the stimulation of individual neurons in the brain, and this makes it easier for the brain to do all sorts of things, from moving muscles to learning new languages. As Stefan Klein puts it in his book The Science of Happiness:

…once in the brain, [dopamine] has seemingly miraculous powers. It helps control our alertness and attention. It stimulates curiosity, the ability to learn, imagination, creativity and sexual drive… Under its influence we feel motivated, optimistic, and full of self-confidence.

So when Isen’s happy group tackled the diagnosis problem, all the dopamine that had been released into their brains was giving their problem solving skills and creativity a natural supercharge. How about that!

Implications

The implications of Isen’s study are huge. Imagine what it would be like to radically lift the energy and problem solving abilities of your staff, friends or family just through giving small unexpected gifts? Wouldn’t you want to work or live in an environment where everyone’s glad to be there, and firing on all cylinders?

I guess the only caveat is that is this example, the gift needs to be unexpected for the effect to work – so you wouldn’t expect this to keep working if you tried it every day for a week.

But I’m not expecting anything this afternoon.

So why not head out to the store now and buy those chocolates, tell your staff how amazing they are, make them feel great, and as a result see them work more productively, efficiently and creatively!

References

Ashby, F. G., Isen, A. M., & Turken, A. U. (1999). A neuropsychological theory of positive affect and its influence on cognition. Psychological Review, 106, 529-550.

Isen, A. M., Rosenzweig, A. S., & Young, M. J. (1991). The influence of positive affect on clinical problem solving. Medical Decision Making, 11, 221-227.

Klein, S. (2006). The Science of Happiness: How Our Brains Make Us Happy-and What We Can Do to Get Happier. Marlow & Company, New York.

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Today’s video is a brief explanation of the functions of dopamine: