The emotionally intelligent use of attention and affective arousal under creative frustration and creative success

Why are some individuals able to generate outstanding creative products despite repeated frustrating failures? This question has persisted across the centuries and deals with the nature of creativity itself. We hypothesize that the attitude characterizing how people experience and regulate their emotions (i.e., trait emotional intelligence; trait EI) can explain the differences emerging in creative performance under frustration or success. We explored this hypothesis by inducing, through artificial evaluations during a creative task, either creative frustration or creative success, and by measuring changes in attentional and affective processing through eye-tracking. We expected that trait EI, through a moderation of the attentional and affective components defining the creative process, could predict creative performance. Results supported our expectation, showing that through the regulation of the affect experienced during the creative process, trait EI allows the best use of the attentive and affective resources beneficial to creative thinking.