The more open, the more creative? The metaphorical effects of postural openness on divergent thinking and convergent thinking

Abstract

As one of the most prevalent bodily states in daily life, postures can exert an impact on creative thinking. Adopting the perspective of embodied metaphor, two studies were conducted using the "posture-cognition" dual-task paradigm to investigate the influence of different postural openness on creative thinking. Study 1 explored the effects of expansive/open versus contractive/closed postures on divergent thinking and convergent thinking, and observed whether they were modulated by standing and sitting postures. Study 2 further examined the participants' performance on a convergent thinking task and a non-creative detail processing task of varying difficulty under identical postures. Results indicated better divergent thinking performance with expansive postures than with contractive postures, confirming the "expansive-divergent" metaphor. The expansive standing posture was found to be the most conducive posture for divergent thinking. However, the contractive postures failed to facilitate the convergent thinking task, but showed more conducive to the moderately difficult non-creative detail processing task. These findings support that body postures can have a metaphorical effect on higher cognitive processes such as creative thinking, but the effect varies depending on the type of creative cognitive processing. This research enhances the comprehension of embodied creativity and provides valuable insights for educational practice.