Not Just Happy or Sad: An Exploratory Study on How Fine-Grained Emotions Relate to Linguistic Creativity in Improvised Speech

Research on creativity often treats emotions using broad categories such as positive versus negative affect, which obscure the role of specific emotional states in creative performance. This exploratory study examines how fine-grained emotions relate to linguistic creativity in improvised speech. Thirty adult participants completed speech tasks across happy, neutral, and sad conditions, producing 90 speech samples. The responses were transcribed and evaluated using TTCT-inspired creativity dimensions: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Fine-grained emotional states were estimated from the transcripts using automatic emotion recognition, and their associations with creativity scores were examined through statistical analysis. The findings suggest that linguistic creativity in improvised speech can be better understood by considering specific emotional profiles rather than relying only on broad positive or negative affect categories. The study contributes an exploratory methodological framework for future research on affect-aware creativity support systems and Computational models of emotion–creativity interaction.