Can creative productivity be both positively and negatively correlated with psychopathology? Yes!

摘要

Empirical research on the hypothesized relation between creativity and psychopathology must take care to frame the question very carefully. If a person's creativity is defined by the output of creative products, then the empirical association can be either positive or negative, depending on how that association is specified. On the one hand, individuals who make at least one creative contribution to a domain may exhibit lower risk of psychopathology than those who never do. On the other hand, among those individuals who contribute one or more creative products, those who contribute the most creative products may have higher risk of psychopathology than those who contribute the fewest creative products. These two hypotheses can both be empirically confirmed because the cross-sectional distribution of creative output is described by a highly skewed inverse power function known as Lotka's Law (Lotka, 1926). That is, the number of individuals producing n creative products is proportional to 12 (Egghe, 2005). Given this skewed distribution, the risk rate can easily increase as a linear function of creative productivity even though the overall risk rate is strikingly lower than in the general population.