Do negative emotions make for better creative decisions?

Posted on | February 28, 2010 | No Comments

Do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?

That’s one suggestion that comes from the recent article by Jonah Lehrer on the ‘upside’ of sadness. Lehrer examines research, published in Psychological Review by Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist, which offers the idea that sadness and depression are strategies the mind uses to figure things out, learn, and make better decisions.

I won’t repeat the research here, but the key point is that emotional pain is for a reason. The pain is used, for example, so we withdraw from the world to avoid further pain; so we focus solely on the causes of the pain; to understand. To medicate the pain away (or f*ck, as Pink and her fans put it, in often beautiful and creative ways) can be to negate the positive effects of the pain.

What interested me is when Lehrer goes on to discuss this in relation to writing. The psychiatrist Andrews goes on to talk about ‘expressive writing’ (asking depressed subjects to write about their feelings: interesting link to academic vs expressive writing) and how this led to significantly shorter depressive episodes. “The reason, Thomson suggests, is that writing is a form of thinking, which enhances our natural problem-solving abilities.” I’m writing this quite soon after a relationship break up. What does that say about this piece of writing, or the need to write?

Evidence of the relationship between sadness/depression and creative practice is nothing new. For example, Lehrer also looks at the research of the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, who interviewed 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about their mental history.

This is worth quoting at length:

Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

There was something here that chimed with my relationship break-up.  The person was loving, active, tactile, giving, open and honest. But for me there was, amongst the complex of lack and unsteadiness, something going on about her deprecation of sadness, of the dark places, of rumination and thinking, that was not compatible for us. Even as I’m writing this, I know it’s selfish and mawkish. I’m also aware that if writing is a form of thinking, some thoughts are not true; some thoughts are incorrect thoughts. And I’m a little raw and confused. Embarrassed.

But back to the question then: do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?

According to Lehrer quoting Joe Forgas, yes, in at least one sense. Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has “repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations.” And again, to quote:

Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

And writing is a problem. Every day. Creative practice is a problem. Every day. As Lehrer begins his argument, Darwin lost “one day in every three” to depression. In yesterday’s Guardian, an article on the composer Wolfgang Rihm is explicit about this: “Every day I go through the same crisis,” says Rihm. “I sit there and nothing comes. But I win the struggle, because every day, I write. And this crisis refreshes me. But it can be terrible too — I become depressed if no ideas are there. It’s always difficult at the beginning of a piece, where nothing is there, and at the end, when I don’t know how to finish.”

Although this from one of classical music’s most prolific composers. Over 400 pieces. I would be very interested to know how Rihm overcomes these moments of crises. How he makes that first step to overcome resistance.

Creativity coach and writing instructor Roseanne Bane at the University of St Thomas, Minnesota, has also, like Lehrer, turned to neuroscience as a way to understand resistance to the creative writing process, and for tools to overcome those resistances (such as writer’s block and the faces of the saboteur).

Her latest piece, published in the Creative Writing Teaching online journal, argues that understanding the neurology of students in a writing class can aid teaching, and instructors should work on flipping the Reticular Activating System, so that it moves the individual from being controlled by the limbic system (freeze, fight or flight: all manifesting themselves in resistance to writing) to the cerebral cortex, the “learning brain”, which “gives us the ability to solve problems, use language and numbers, create, anticipate the future, motivate ourselves, and reflect on our body and modify our behavior” (Bane quoting Howard Pierce, The Owners Manual for the Brain).

These approaches don’t contradict each other. Freeze/fight/flight resistances aren’t the same as sadness in response to pain or trauma, or more serious depression. But they are interesting to think through ‘beside’ each other, as the sadly missed Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests in her book Touching Feeling. Looking at things beside each other eliminates the position of duality or hierarchy, a way of understanding human desire “that might be quite to the side of prohibition and repression, that might hence be structured quite differently from the heroic, ‘liberatory’, inescapably dualistic righteousness of hunting down and attacking prohibition/repression in all its chameleonic guises.” (TF, 10).

In the first essay in Touching Feeling, Kosofsky Sedgwick looks at Henry James, and specifically at the shame-interest (or, as Todd Kashdan might put it, the shame-curiosity) relation. She looks at how the affect of shame and the mode of depression plays a role James’ writing of his novels in a prodigious phase:

To consider interest itself a distinct affect and to posit an association between shame and (the [incomplete] inhibition of) interest makes sense phenomenologically, I think, about depression, and specifically about the depressions out of which James had emerged to write his ‘major novels’–novels that do, indeed, seem to show the effects of a complicated history of disruption and prodigal remediations in the ability to take an interest. (TF, 39-40)

And so what Kosofsky Sedgwick draws our attention to is perhaps the ways in which these theories, ideas and suggestions can perhaps work together in creative practice. The sadness and depression lets James reflect in a focused and critical way upon his writing. And the ability to take an interest again–to turn up the dial, as it were, on curiosity, on interest in his words, his world–that is, to flip, perhaps, from the limbic to the cerebral cortex systems–brought about a prodigious writing period.

James was in Kosofsky Sedgwick’s phrase “reissuing” the collected volumes of his work, which were to receive no praise. Periods of depression did indeed, as Lehrer puts it above, “produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by [his] angst.” but the next sentence in Touching Feeling is a warning: “Into such depressions as well, however, he was again to be plunged.” Every day, the same crisis.

Where does that leave me?

I had thought, originally, that this was a useful concept for my characters, in the novel. That it would be out of times of crisis, times of pain and depression, that the most useful or better decisions in the narrative are made. But what about my practice as a writer? Do I maintain a healthy sadness, do I embrace the crisis? Is it leaving me refreshed every day?

Recently K did my horoscope chart. Uranus conjunct with everything in my 4th house, the place of home. It’s a tricksy energy, Uranus. But she did say she had never seen a chart that shouted so loudly, ‘this person is a writer’. That was some comfort for the equally loud cry–my interpretation, probably somewhat skewed by present events–that ‘this person is not a partner’. The composer Rihm lives in a separate house from his family set-up. I suppose we all need to find what works for us in life. I would like to find this out before the hurt sets in again.

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