ABSTRACT
Emotions are related to creativity in many ways-as facilitators, inhibitors, and simply as adventitious by-products. In this chapter, I consider two of the more positive ways-namely, emotions as mediators and as products of creative activity. These two ways involve different meanings of emotion. In the first (mediational) sense, emotion refers to the broad matrix of experience in which all behavior is embedded. Various names have been given to emotions in this sense; for example, feeling tones (Getz & Lubart, 2000), affective tones (Isen, 2000), and background feelings (Damasio, 1994). A common theme that runs through these formulations is that emotional feelings (the term I use here) can act as catalysts to creativity without, however, entering into the final product. Until emotional feelings are given symbolic form and made manifest in behavior, there is little reason to speak of them as either creative or noncreative in and of themselves.
