Study of 14,658 Swedish twins links artistic, but not scientific, creativity to mental health problems

A team led by Penghao Xia of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and Karolinska Institutet analysed data from 14,658 Swedish twins. In Molecular Psychiatry they report that artistic and scientific creativity relate differently to mental health nature.comMolecular Psychiatrynature.comOpen source ↗. The data came from two survey rounds about a decade apart, and 6,419 twins completed both.

How creativity and mental health were measured

Creativity was assessed broadly: through achievement in music, writing, theater, dance, visual art, science and invention, through occupation, through the personality trait of openness, and through psychometric tests. In the second survey, divergent thinking was tested by asking participants to produce 10 words as unrelated in meaning as possible. Mental health was taken from self-reports and from psychiatric diagnoses in Swedish health records. The authors note that the different creativity measures often had little in common.

Artistic and scientific creativity differ

Higher artistic creativity, indexed by artistic achievement and openness, was associated with worse mental health, including psychosis proneness, major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder. Participants with more artistic achievement reported more depressive symptoms and psychosis-like experiences. They were also more likely to receive a later diagnosis of schizophrenia, anxiety or a stress-related disorder.

Measures of scientific creativity showed mostly non-significant or even negative associations with mental health problems. This was most pronounced for occupational creativity nature.comMolecular Psychiatrynature.comOpen source ↗. The authors suggest that demanding scientific workplaces may favour people who cope better with pressure, but they say no data currently support this explanation.

The role of genes

Co-twin control and polygenic score analyses suggested that shared genetic factors played an important role in the associations. When twins were compared directly, most associations weakened or disappeared statistically. People with a higher genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or stress-related disorders also tended to report higher artistic achievement. Genetic correlations likewise indicated shared underlying genetic influences.

There was one exception. A potential causal association between depressive symptoms and openness persisted even in the longitudinal co-twin control model. The authors describe the overall relationship between artistic creativity and mental health as complex, bidirectional and genetically influenced.