Giles St J Burch | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Schizotypy and creativity in visual artists.

'Every work of art is an uncommitted crime' Adorno (1951). Cited in Julius (2002). Given the putative relationship between creativity and schizotypy/psychoticism, the current study set out to investigate differences in scores on a range of personality and creativity measures between visual artists and non-artists. Results found that the visual artists group scored higher on measures of positive-schizotypy, disorganized-schizotypy, asocial-schizotypy, neuroticism, openness and divergent thinking (uniqueness) than did the non-artist group and lower on agreeableness. These findings lend support to other studies reporting higher schizotypy scores in artistic and creative cohorts, although provide some of the first evidence of higher unusual experiences and impulsive nonconformity scores on the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE) in visual artists. The relationship between creativity and schizotypy is discussed in terms of unusual ideas and a propensity to endorse socially undesirable responses.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Trials-to-criterion latent inhibition in humans as a function of stimulus pre-exposure and positive-schizotypy.

Latent inhibition (LI) is a phenomenon during which non-reinforced pre-exposure to a stimulus retards later learning of associations with that same stimulus. It has been suggested that LI is a positive function of the amount of stimulus pre-exposure (PE) and that with very small amounts of PE, facilitation rather than inhibition will occur-particularly in high positive-schizotypes. Although LI has been demonstrated as a function of the amount of pre-exposure in animals, human findings have not proved to be so uniform or consistent. The primary objective of the present study was to establish LI as a function of numbers of pre-exposure on visual and auditory trials-to-criterion tasks, with a secondary objective to establish latent facilitation (LF) with very low numbers of pre-exposure in high positive-schizotypes. Results revealed a uniform pattern of learning across pre-exposure conditions, including latent facilitation, on the visual, but not the auditory task. LF was also observed in the high, but not low, scorers in positive-schizotypy with very low numbers of pre-exposure on the visual task.

Acoustic Stimulation↗