Schizophrenia and creativity: A meta-analytic review
Section snippets
Schizophrenia and creativity: A meta-analytic review
The link between madness and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent among laypeople and unsurprisingly has become controversial among researchers (Jamison, 1993, Simonton, 2010a, Simonton, 2010b). Simply phrased as mad-genius hypothesis, this connection is often explored in terms of the relationship between creativity and psychopathology. In fact, creativity may be one of the few fields, if not the only one, in which mental illnesses are perceived differently. Instead of being
Study variables
Schizophrenia and creativity were the two major study variables. Schizophrenia was mostly diagnosed based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) third or fourth version although there were a few studies that followed a psychometric approach. Creativity was operationalized in many different ways. Table 1 provides the list of methods and instruments used in the present meta-analysis.
Inclusion and exclusion criteria
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Quantitative articles published in peer-reviewed journals were included. Qualitative
Results
Before running the analyses, the effect sizes (k = 200 obtained from 42 studies) were investigated in terms of publication bias. Neither Egger's regression test, t (199) = − 0.67, p < 0.50, nor Begg and Mazumdar's rank correlation, rt. = − 0.04, p = 0.368, were significant. Therefore, publication bias did not seem to be an issue for the present dataset. A stem-and-leaf plot was presented in Fig. 2.
An unconditional three-level model was tested initially to calculate average mean effect size. This model had
Discussion
Results of the present meta-analysis showed that the relationship between creativity and schizophrenia is negative (r = − 0.324) and the nature of the relationship is influenced by the way creativity is measured, severity of the schizophrenia, the content of creativity test, and patient type. This finding can be interpreted alongside prior meta-analyses that investigated the relationship between creativity and psychoticism (Acar and Runco, 2012) and schizotypy (Acar and Sen, 2013). Those
Conclusion
The present meta-analysis found that creativity has a negative relationship with schizophrenia. Small but positive correlation of creativity with psychoticism and positive schizotypy does not apply to schizophrenia. Anecdotal evidence reporting higher creativity with mental illnesses, more specifically, schizophrenia is not supported by empirical evidence based on psychometric measures of creativity. This finding certainly supports the argument that creativity is mainly a healthy behavior (
Role of the funding source
No funding was used for this study.
Contributors
Selcuk Acar and Nur Cayirdag designed the study and collected the data. Xiao Chen collected additional data, conducted a literature review and verified the accuracy of the coding.
Conflict of interest
There is none.
Acknowledgements
We thank to Barrett Gordon for proofreading this manuscript.
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Note: References with asterisk (*) indicate studies included to meta-analysis.