[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

A New Tool for Creative Thinking: Mind-Body Dissonance

Did you ever get the giggles during a religious service or some other serious occasion?  Did you ever have to smile politely when you felt like screaming?  In these situations, the emotions that we are required to express differ from the ones we are feeling inside.  That can be stressful, unpleasant, and exhausting.  Normally our minds and our bodies are in harmony.  When facial expressions or posture depart from how we feel, we experience what two psychologists at Northwestern University, Li Huang and Adam Galinsky, call mind–body dissonance.  And in a fascinating new paper, they show that such awkward clashes between mind and body can actually be useful: they help us think more expansively.

Ask yourself, would you say that a camel is a vehicle?  Would you describe a handbag as an item of clothing?  Your default answer might be negative, but there’s a way in which the camels can be regarded as forms of transport, and handbags can certainly be said to dress up an outfit.  When we think expansively, we think about categories more inclusively, we stop privileging the average cases, and extend our horizons to the atypical or exotic.  Expansive thought can be regarded a kind of creativity, and an opportunity for new insights.

Huang and Galinsky have shown that mind–body dissonance can make us think expansively.  In a clever series of studies, they developed a way to get people’s facial expressions to depart from their emotional experiences.  Participants were asked to either hold a pen between their teeth, forcing an unwitting smile, or to affix two golf tees in a particular position on their foreheads, unwittingly forcing an expression of sadness.  While in these facial configurations subjects were asked to recall happy and sad events or listen to happy and sad music.

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