The Tortured Artist

The tortured artists. You know them. The brooding poet, the drug-addicted actress, the painter who cut off his own ear. This archetypal character may be regarded as only a stereotype, but there are plenty of real life examples throughout history of creatively inclined people who fit the description. You might even know one personally. And while not necessarily accurate, stereotypes generally come from somewhere. So is it coincidence? Or is there something substantial behind the idea that creativity and psychopathology are linked?

In an article published a few years back entitled Creativity, Psychopathology, and Emotion Processing: A Liberal Response Bias for Remembering Negative Information is Associated with Higher Creativity, Doctors Marina Drus, Aaron Kozbelt, and Robert R. Hughes sought to examine the extent to which more creative people process emotions and emotional information differently than less creative people. 

117 undergraduate students from the university of Boston participated in the study. They were first tested for creativity via the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (QAC) which measures self-reported lifetime accomplishments in creativity, and by two timed thinking tasks from the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA). The first task included verbalizing as many problems as they could think of that might arise if people were able to fly or walk on air, and the second task involved making as many pictures as possible out of nine triangles. Participants answers were measured for fluency (number of responses), originality (degree of novelty of responses), flexibility (difference between responses given), and elaboration (amount of detail of responses). All scores were combined to produce a final measure of "divergent thinking performance". Participants were then tested for emotional processing through the Try Meta Mood Scale, a self-report Likert survey designed to asses attention to emotions, clarity of emotions, and emotional repair of negative emotions. Lastly, the participants participated in a word association task in which they were shown 40 words one at a time (10 positive, 10 negative, 20 neutral) for 2 seconds each on a computer and were told to pay attention to them. They were then shown the words again along with 20 new words (5 positive, 5 negative, and 10 neutral) and were given 3 seconds to say whether or not they had previously seen each word. This part of the testing was designed to measure sensitivity to words by the degree of liberalness of the response threshold (a tendency to say yes when in doubt). That is, for example, a more liberal response threshold in association with negative words (more likely to say yes to negative words when uncertain) equates higher vulnerability to negative information. 

The results of the study found that self-reported high creative achievement levels and better performance on divergent thinking tasks (indicators of a creative individual) were associated with greater sensitivity to positive words and a more liberal response bias for negative words (which indicates an even greater sensitivity to negative words). So in conclusion, more creative individuals were shown to be more sensitive to positive information and especially sensitive to negative information in comparison to less creative individuals. These results indicate a potential for comorbidity between creativity and psychopathology... suggesting that the tortured artists persona may be more than a stereotype after all. 

Coming from a family where both creativity and mental illness are greatly prevalent, this article immediately grabbed my attention. How interesting it would be for these two characteristics I see co-occurring in multiple members of my extended family to be psychologically linked. All in all I found the study's methods of examination extremely interesting and highly creative. Through the use of three different tests, tweaked slightly to fit their specific needs, the scientists who conducted this study thoroughly evaluated participants' creativity levels and sensitivities to emotional information, generating fairly quantitative results about aspects of personality that aren't easy to study. 

Source (VT Libraries): http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=4113eddf-781d-4602-abff-407f9356a481%40sessionmgr4003&vid=22&hid=4101

BPD Depression and Biological Rhythms

Bipolar disorder is characterized by extended periods of (generally) cycling high and low states. The  high state, called mania, is marked by high energy, reckless behavior, racing thoughts, feelings of grandeur or increased self confidence, as well as a reduced need for sleep. The low state, or depression, is characterized by sluggishness, feelings of hopelessness, loss of interest, etc., but also either increased need for sleep or insomnia. For both aspects of bipolar disorder, sleep is a major factor and is majorly affected by the disorder.

In a recent study, a group of scientists investigated the association between depression and  biological rhythms in the functioning of bipolar disorder sufferers. Biological rhythms are the natural patterns of functioning that our bodies follow. For example, ultradian rhythms occur more than once a day, like patters of hunger, and circadian rhythms occur over a period of about 24 hours, such as our daily sleep schedules. In accordance with the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the scientists in this study hypothesized that more severe depression would equate more disruption in biological rhythms. 

In order to test these disruptions, an interview administered questionnaire was used to asses disruptions in sleep, eating patterns, social rhythms, and general activity, under the protocol of the Biological Rhythms Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (BRAIN). Patients were first evaluated for manic and depressive symptoms with the Young Mania Rating Scale, and those afflicted with depression were sorted into three groups based on severity of symptoms: remission, subsyndromal, and depressed. The total of 260 bipolar patients, as well as 191 healthy patients, all from Spain, Canada and Brazil, were then interviewed. Various levels of statistical analysis were performed to confirm significance of results and accurate comparison of the four groups. As predicted, depressed patients had the greatest disturbance in biological rhythms, followed by patients with subsyndromal symptoms, patients in remission, and finally, the healthy control patients. 

Overall, the results of this study were nothing short of expected. The DSM-5 criteria for diagnosing bipolar disorder specifically outlines sleep disturbances as indicators of the disorder. Additionally, the only methods of testing used were interview based, nothing biological. I think it would have been interesting to see the results of testing various hormonal levels in the body that pertain to biological rhythms, and a comparison of the levels or times of day where hormones were present in depressive bipolar disorder patients to those in healthy control patients. As only interviews were given, it makes sense that the patients first diagnosed with bipolar disorder would then self report having the symptoms of bipolar disorder (disrupted sleep, eating patters, activity, etc.). 

This article first grabbed my attention because I have often noticed the disrupted sleep patterns in a close friend of mine who has bipolar disorder. Getting too little sleep for instance makes it more likely that a manic episode will be triggered, and part of his treatment involves maintaining a highly regulated sleep schedule. I was hoping that this article might give me more insight into how bipolar disorder works biologically, but while the study was not uninteresting, it's results were not at all surprising or new in their idea. 

Source (VT Libraries): http://su8bj7jh4j.search.serialssolutions.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/?sid=EBSCO:Academic%20Search%20Complete&genre=article&title=Acta%20Psychiatrica%20Scandinavica&atitle=The%20association%20between%20biological%20rhythms%2C%20depression%2C%20and%20functioning%20in%20bipolar%20disorder%3A%20a%20large%20multi-center%20study.&author=Pinho%2C%20M.&authors=Pinho%2C%20M.%3BSehmbi%2C%20M.%3BCudney%2C%20L.%20E.%3BKauer-Sant%27anna%2C%20M.%3BMagalhães%2C%20P.%20V.%3BReinares%2C%20M.%3BBonn%C3%ADn%2C%20C.%20M.%3BSassi%2C%20R.%20B.%3BKapczinski%2C%20F.%3BColom%2C%20F.%3BVieta%2C%20E.%3BFrey%2C%20B.%20N.%3BRosa%2C%20A.%20R&date=20160201&volume=133&issue=2&spage=102&issn=0001690X

Rejection: It Hurts

Nearly everyone, at least once, has experienced some sort of social rejection, loss, or exclusion - anything from finding out your friends all went out without you last weekend, to breaking up with your significant other, to that pretty woman in the office declining the dinner invitation you've been practicing in your head for weeks. And for those who have experienced such rejections, we know that they can sting. Rejection hurts... literally.

Literally? According to some studies, social pain (the pain we perceive from a social rejection, exclusion, or loss) may travel down some of the same neural pathways as physical pain. So what is pain? Biologically, it's a response to tissue damage. The point of pain is to alert us that something is wrong, so that we can withdraw from the source, and begin recovery. We are familiar with social rejections being described as painful - a "painful" breakup or a "broken" heart - but aren't these just figures of speech? Maybe. But scientists have reason to believe that social pains are just as real as physical ones. 

In a study entitled Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion a team of scientists analyzed the brain activity of participants who were playing a virtual ball game in which they were excluded. Pain information comes to a part of the brain call the cingulate cortex. In accordance with previous studies done on physical pain, the scientists performing this study focused on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) region of the participants' brains. In order to perform this study, the scientist took fMRI scans of the participants' brains while playing the virtual game. During the game, the participants were made to believe they were playing with to other people. These other players (actually just part of the computer program) allowed the participant to play with them for a period of time and then proceeded to exclude the participant by refusing to pass the participant the ball for the remainder of the game. In addition to the fMRI scans, the participants were asked to self report their levels of distress after the game had ended. The results of the study showed significant amounts of increased activity in the ACC during the time that the participants were being rejected, indicating that the ACC (where pain information is integrated) was activated during this time. These findings also aligned with the emotional stress at being ignored that participants self reported at the end of the study. 

Considered from a biological standpoint, it makes sense that emotional hurts might actually cause us pain. Evolutionarily, social interactions were a major key in human survival. Babies and children are highly dependent on parents, and cooperation and mutualism are major aspects of human societies. Even today, passing on ones genes requires some degree of social skills in finding a partner to do so with. Pain of rejection, then, could alert us to situations that could be potentially damaging to us in the social aspect of our survival. 

While there has been much speculation on the subject, this particular study used a biological basis to examine the idea, and produced measurable, significant data. For that reason I thought this article is strong in it's hypothesis and a reputable source of information. Additionally, it goes nicely with our chapter on pain, and I feel that it is highly relatable, as most of us have felt some form of social rejection or another. As a fairly sensitive person and a biology major, it was interesting to see how feelings can be so biologically linked, so close as that neurologically, they may cause the same reactions to somatosensory stimuli.  

Source (VT Libraries): http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/10.1126%2Fscience.1089134