Artists Are More Anxious Than People in Other Professions—But They Are Also Better at Coping With Challenges, a New Study Finds

In 1963, the pioneering creativity scholar Frank Barron wrote
that the “creative genius… is both more primitive and more
cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally
crazier and yet adamantly saner than the average person.”

His contradictory claims, which he formed largely through
personality tests and interviews with creative individuals
(including Norman Mailer and Truman Capote) over the course of his
career, were not only bold—they may turn out to be verifiably
true.

Researchers at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence
recently took Barron’s ideas, which he arrived at without
using the empirical methods that have become standard practice
among social scientists, and found ways to measure and quantify
them.

For a new study published in the
journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the
Arts, the researchers set out to determine whether
artists possess more psychological vulnerabilities and
more psychological strengths than people who work in non-creative
fields.

They surveyed 309 artists on faculty at top US art schools and a
similarly sized sample of workers who had no training in the arts.
Both groups were asked about their “crazy” sides (or their
“psychological vulnerabilities,” in updated parlance), which were
defined as the degrees of stress, anxiety, and depression they
experience in their everyday lives. Subjects were also asked about
their “saner” sides (aka their “psychological resources”), which
include a range of characteristics such as self-acceptance,
personal growth, positive relationships, autonomy, hope, and ego
resilience.

The results show that the artists ranked moderately higher on
the stress and anxiety measures, but also on those indicating hope,
ego resilience, and psychological well-being.

In other words, the artists were both “crazier” and “saner” than
the non-artists, as Barron phrased it. (The artists did not rate
any differently in depression, and they rated higher in all of the
positive categories except “environmental mastery,” which indicates
how much control people feel over their life circumstances.)

According to the study, the relationship between a psychological
strength and a psychological weakness is key: Most of the
time, individuals who have more vulnerabilities also have fewer
resources. “It makes sense that if people experience more symptoms
of stress, anxiety, or depression, they are less likely to have
hope or be psychologically well,” writes study co-author
Zorana Ivcevic Pringle. Only about 10 percent of people have higher
degrees of both. And it is that interaction, on a moderate level,
that tends to predict creative achievement.

The study doesn’t explicitly answer why this interplay of
vulnerabilities and resources correlates with higher creativity.
But it proposes one suggestion: that stress and mental illness can
be “diversifying experiences.”

In this view, people who face adversity must operate outside
cultural norms to find ways to cope. But for these experiences to
also enhance creativity, “people need to have resources that enable
them to respond to the challenges of their circumstances,” the
researchers write. So, in short, a little bit of adversity can go a
long way—but only if it doesn’t break you in the process.

The post Artists Are More Anxious Than People in Other
Professions—But They Are Also Better at Coping With Challenges, a
New Study Finds appeared first on artnet News.