Health Gem

IF YOU DO ONE THING THIS WEEK . . . GET CREATIVE WITH GREEN

DO YOU need a burst of creativity? Perhaps you could try looking at something green. Glimpsing green appears to enhance performance in creative tasks, according to new research. The study set up four experiments that asked participants to look at green or at another colour for a couple of seconds before carrying out picture- or word-based tasks that assess creativity. Participants were not aware of the aim of the experiments.

“In four experiments, we demonstrated that a brief glimpse of green prior to a creativity task enhances creative performance” write the authors online in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “These findings indicate that green has implications beyond aesthetics and suggest the need for sustained empirical work on the functional meaning of green.”