Insight problem solving in individuals with high versus low schizotypy

Schizophrenia patients perform as well as healthy controls on creative problem solving when fluid intelligence is accounted for

INTRODUCTION

This study examined creative problem solving in schizophrenia. We aimed to verify three hypotheses: (H1) schizophrenia patients differ from healthy controls in the accuracy of creative problem solving; (H2) schizophrenia patients are less effective at evaluating and rejecting incorrect associations and (H3) have a more idiosyncratic way of searching for semantic associations compared to controls.

METHODS

Six Remote Associates Test (RAT) items and three insight problems were applied to schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. We compared groups on the overall accuracy in the tasks to verify H1 and developed a novel method of comparing the patterns of errors in the RAT to verify H2 and H3. We controlled for fluid intelligence to eliminate this significant source of variation, as typically creativity and intelligence are significantly related.

RESULTS

Bayesian factor analysis did not support the group differences in either insight problems and RAT accuracy or the patterns of RAT errors.

CONCLUSIONS

The patients performed as well as the controls on both tasks. Analysis of RAT errors suggested that the process of searching for remote associations is comparable in both groups. It is highly improbable that individuals with schizophrenia benefit from their diagnosis during creative problem solving.

Creativity and Bipolar Disorder: A Shared Genetic Vulnerability

Bipolar disorder is a lifelong mood disorder characterized by extreme mood swings between mania and depression. Despite fitness costs associated with increased mortality and significant impairment, bipolar disorder has persisted in the population with a high heritability and a stable prevalence. Creativity and other positive traits have repeatedly been associated with the bipolar spectrum, particularly among unaffected first-degree relatives and those with milder expressions of bipolar traits. This suggests a model in which large doses of risk variants cause illness, but mild to moderate doses confer advantages, which serve to maintain bipolar disorder in the population. Bipolar disorder may thus be better conceptualized as a dimensional trait existing at the extreme of normal population variation in positive temperament, personality, and cognitive traits, aspects of which may reflect a shared vulnerability with creativity. Investigations of this shared vulnerability may provide insight into the genetic mechanisms underlying illness and suggest novel treatments.

Thinking dispositions and cognitive reflection performance in schizotypy

Schizotypy refers to the continuum of normal variability of psychosis-like characteristics and experiences, often classified as positive schizotypy (‘unusual experiences’; UE) and negative schizotypy (‘introvertive anhedonia’; IA). Here, we investigated the link between schizotypy and cognitive processing style and performance. A particular focus was on whether schizotypy is associated more with Type 1 (automatic/heuristic) than Type 2 (reflective/effortful) processes, as may be expected from findings of impaired top-down control in schizophrenia. A large sample (n = 1,512) completed online measures pertaining to schizotypy (Oxford-Liverpool Inventory for Feelings and Experiences; O-LIFE), thinking style (Rational Experiential Inventory-10, Actively Open-Minded Thinking Scale), and reasoning performance (Cognitive Reflection Test). Higher positive (UE) and negative (IA) schizotypy were associated with more pronounced Type 1 processing, i.e. greater self-reported Faith in Intuition (FI), lower Need for Cognition (NFC), lower Actively Open-Minded Thinking (AOT), and lower cognitive reflection test (CRT) scores. Canonical correlation analysis confirmed a significant association between UE and increased FI, lower AOT and lower CRT performance, accounting for 12.38% of the shared variance between schizotypy and thinking dispositions. IA was more highly associated with reduced NFC. These findings suggest that schizotypy may be associated with similar thinking dispositions to those reported in psychosis, with different patterns of associations for positive and negative schizotypy. This result informs research on reasoning processes in psychosis and has clinical implications, including potential treatment targets and refinements for cognitive therapies.

Insight Is Not in the Problem: Investigating Insight in Problem Solving across Task Types

The feeling of insight in problem solving is typically associated with the sudden realization of a solution that appears obviously correct (Kounios et al., 2006). Salvi et al. (2016) found that a solution accompanied with sudden insight is more likely to be correct than a problem solved through conscious and incremental steps. However, Metcalfe (1986) indicated that participants would often present an inelegant but plausible (wrong) answer as correct with a high feeling of warmth (a subjective measure of closeness to solution). This discrepancy may be due to the use of different tasks or due to different methods in the measurement of insight (i.e., using a binary vs. continuous scale). In three experiments, we investigated both findings, using many different problem tasks (e.g., Compound Remote Associates, so-called classic insight problems, and non-insight problems). Participants rated insight-related affect (feelings of Aha-experience, confidence, surprise, impasse, and pleasure) on continuous scales. As expected we found that, for problems designed to elicit insight, correct solutions elicited higher proportions of reported insight in the solution compared to non-insight solutions; further, correct solutions elicited stronger feelings of insight compared to incorrect solutions.

Genetic influences on insight problem solving: the role of catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene polymorphisms

People may experience an “aha” moment, when suddenly realizing a solution of a puzzling problem. This experience is called insight problem solving. Several findings suggest that catecholamine-related genes may contribute to insight problem solving, among which the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene is the most promising candidate. The current study examined 753 healthy individuals to determine the associations between 7 candidate single nucleotide polymorphisms on the COMT gene and insight problem-solving performance, while considering gender differences. The results showed that individuals carrying A allele of rs4680 or T allele of rs4633 scored significantly higher on insight problem-solving tasks, and the COMT gene rs5993883 combined with gender interacted with correct solutions of insight problems, specifically showing that this gene only influenced insight problem-solving performance in males. This study presents the first investigation of the genetic impact on insight problem solving and provides evidence that highlights the role that the COMT gene plays in insight problem solving.

Schizotypy--do not worry, it is not all worrisome

A long-standing tradition in personality research in psychology, and nowadays increasingly in psychiatry, is that psychotic and psychotic-like thoughts are considered common experiences in the general population. Given their widespread occurrence, such experiences cannot merely reflect pathological functioning. Moreover, reflecting the multi-dimensionality of schizotypy, some dimensions might be informative for healthy functioning while others less so. Here, we explored these possibilities by reviewing research that links schizotypy to favorable functioning such as subjective wellbeing, cognitive functioning (major focus on creativity), and personality correlates. This research highlights the existence of healthy people with psychotic-like traits who mainly experience positive schizotypy (but also affective features mapping onto bipolar disorder). These individuals seem to benefit from a healthy way to organize their thoughts and experiences, that is, they employ an adaptive cognitive framework to explain and integrate their unusual experiences. We conclude that, instead of focusing only on the pathological, future studies should explore the behavioral, genetic, imaging, and psychopharmacological correlates that define the healthy expression of psychotic-like traits. Such studies would inform on protective or compensatory mechanisms of psychosis-risk and could usefully inform us on the evolutionary advantages of the psychosis dimension.

The assessment of creativity in creativity/psychopathology research - a systematic review

INTRODUCTION

The possible link between creativity and psychopathology has been a long time focus of research up to the present day. However, this research is hampered by methodological problems, especially the definition and assessment of creativity. This makes interpretation and comparison of studies difficult and possibly accounts for the contradictory results of this research.

METHODS

In this systematic review of the literature, research articles in the field of creativity and psychopathology were searched for creativity assessment tools. The tools used in the collected articles are presented and discussed.

RESULTS

The results indicate that a multitude of creativity assessment tools were used, that many studies only used one tool to assess creativity and that most of these tools were only used in a limited number of studies. A few assessment tools stand out by a more frequent use, also outside psychopathological research, and more solid psychometric properties.

CONCLUSION

Most scales used to evaluate creativity have poor psychometric properties. The scattered methodology to assess creativity compromises the generalizability and validity of this research. The field should creatively develop new validated instruments.

Creative cognition and the brain: dissociations between frontal, parietal-temporal and basal ganglia groups

The objective of the study was to investigate creativity in relation to brain function by assessing creative thinking in various neurological populations. Several measures were employed to assess different facets of creative thinking in clinical groups with frontal lobe, basal ganglia or parietal-temporal lesions relative to matched healthy control participants. The frontal group was subdivided into frontolateral, frontopolar and frontal-extensive groups. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed to assess the significance levels associated with the effects after accounting for IQ differences between the groups. Findings were only considered noteworthy if they at least suggested the presence of a strong trend and were accompanied by medium to large effect sizes. The parietal-temporal and frontolateral groups revealed poorer overall performance with the former demonstrating problems with fluency related measures, whereas the latter were also less proficient at producing original responses. In contrast, the basal ganglia and frontopolar groups demonstrated superior performance in the ability to overcome the constraints imposed by salient semantic distractors when generating creative responses. In summary, the dissociations in the findings reveal the selective involvement of different brain regions in diverse aspects of creativity. Lesion location posed selective limitations on the ability to generate original responses in different contexts, but not on the ability to generate relevant responses, which was compromised in most patient groups. The noteworthy findings from this exploratory study of enhanced performance in specific aspects of creative cognition following brain damage are discussed with reference to the generic idea that superior creative ability can result from altered brain function.

Adaptive evolution of genes underlying schizophrenia

Schizophrenia poses an evolutionary-genetic paradox because it exhibits strongly negative fitness effects and high heritability, yet it persists at a prevalence of approximately 1% across all human cultures. Recent theory has proposed a resolution: that genetic liability to schizophrenia has evolved as a secondary consequence of selection for human cognitive traits. This hypothesis predicts that genes increasing the risk of this disorder have been subject to positive selection in the evolutionary history of humans and other primates. We evaluated this prediction using tests for recent selective sweeps in human populations and maximum-likelihood tests for selection during primate evolution. Significant evidence for positive selection was evident using one or both methods for 28 of 76 genes demonstrated to mediate liability to schizophrenia, including DISC1, DTNBP1 and NRG1, which exhibit especially strong and well-replicated functional and genetic links to this disorder. Strong evidence of non-neutral, accelerated evolution was found for DISC1, particularly for exon 2, the only coding region within the schizophrenia-associated haplotype. Additionally, genes associated with schizophrenia exhibited a statistically significant enrichment in their signals of positive selection in HapMap and PAML analyses of evolution along the human lineage, when compared with a control set of genes involved in neuronal activities. The selective forces underlying adaptive evolution of these genes remain largely unknown, but these findings provide convergent evidence consistent with the hypothesis that schizophrenia represents, in part, a maladaptive by-product of adaptive changes during human evolution.