Study Shows College Students with ADHD Score Higher on Tests that Measure Creativity

March 15, 2011 — An attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis can make many aspects of learning more challenging for children and teens, but some adults with ADHD show signs of enhanced creativity, a study suggests.

ADHD is a behavioral disorder characterized by difficulty focusing, impulsive behaviors, and hyperactivity.

A study of 60 undergraduate students at the University of Memphis found that those with ADHD enjoyed more creative achievement then students without ADHD. College students with ADHD scored better on a series of tests that measured creativity in 10 areas, including drama, humor, music, visual arts, creative writing, invention, and scientific discovery.

The study is published in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences.

“In addition to limitations, ADHD really provides a potential advantage is terms of creative thinking,” says study researcher Holly A. White, an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. “While distraction can be a limitation in a traditional learning environment or workplaces with structured approaches, people with ADHD can be very innovative and generate useful and novel ideas.”

People with ADHD can take an idea and branch it out in lots of different directions, she says. By contrast, people without ADHD take a lot of ideas and pull them into central focus.

Job Options for People with ADHD

So what type of occupations may be best suited for someone with ADHD based on the findings?

“Anything that essentially gives someone a lot of variety and ability to move around,” White says. “They may thrive is sales type positions, as an entrepreneur, or doing anything that allows them to move around, talk to a lot of people, and think outside the box.”

The new findings held regardless of whether those with ADHD were taking medication to control their symptoms. but the new study was not designed to look for such differences.

“It is possible that there may be some trade-off with respect to creativity if medications improve focus,” she says.

Other Conditions Complicate ADHD

Jon Shaw, MD, a professor of psychiatry of the University of Miami School of Medicine, reviewed the new study findings for WebMD.

“There are serious limitations in terms of how generalizable these findings are for the majority of people with ADHD,” he says.

For starters, two-thirds of people with ADHD have co-existing disorders such as anxiety, depression, conduct disorder or bipolar disorder. The study sample did not reflect the high rate of co-existing conditions among people with ADHD and that many people with ADHD don’t make it to college. “The fact that they [study participants] got into college and had such a low rate of co-existing disorders means we can’t generalize to the larger population of ADHD,” Shaw says.

But “we know there is a high correlation between ADHD and bipolar disorder, and people with bipolar disorder can be highly creative, so this may be an interesting venue for further research,” he says.

IOWA CITY (KWWL) – Researchers have for decades hypothesized that negative emotions lead to inflated reports of common physical symptoms, like headaches or an upset stomach. But a new University of Iowa study suggests that two negative emotions –- depression and anxiety –- influence symptom reporting in different ways.

Published in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the study indicates that people who feel depressed report experiencing a higher number of past symptoms. People who feel anxious, by contrast, report more symptoms in the present moment.

Understanding how factors such as mood influence symptom reporting is important because physicians make diagnosis and treatment decisions based on the symptoms patients report, how intense they are, and how frequently they occurred, said study author Jerry Suls, a professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a visiting scientist at the National Cancer Institute in Washington, D.C.

Previous studies have linked inflated symptom reports to “negative affect,” a disposition also known as neuroticism. One-fifth of the population is believed to have this general tendency, which involves frequent feelings of anger, anxiety, fear, irritation or sadness. However, when the UI researchers examined the influence of temperament on symptom recall, they isolated each emotion rather than lumping them together.

“Our data suggest that a person who walks into a physician's office feeling sad will tend to recall experiencing more symptoms than they probably really did,” Suls said. “If a person comes into the physician's office feeling fearful, they're more likely to scan their body and read any sensations they're experiencing at that moment as something wrong. We believe this is because depression is associated with rumination and exaggerated recall of negative experiences, while anxiety is associated with vigilance for potentially negative things in the present time.”

Suls co-authored the study with Bryant Howren, a post-doctoral scholar in the UI Department of Psychology and the Center for Research in the Implementation of Innovative Strategies in Practice (CRIISP) at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City.

In the first part of the study, 144 undergraduate students completed questionnaires to assess their level of “depressive affect,” and indicated which of 15 common physical symptoms they'd experienced in the past three weeks. even after factoring out physical signs of depression, like appetite changes or sleep loss, researchers found that people who felt more depressed believed they had experienced more symptoms.

“Is it possible they actually did experience more symptoms? Sure,” Suls said. “But all of these folks were nominally healthy. It's likely that each one experienced roughly the same number in terms of actual symptoms, but those who happened to be feeling blue thought they had experienced more.”

Another phase of the study examined current symptom reporting. A sample of 125 undergraduates were assigned to groups. to induce a specific mood, each group wrote in detail for 15 minutes about an experience that made them feel angry, anxious, depressed, happy or neutral. They then completed a checklist to indicate which of 24 symptoms (weakness/fatigue, cardiorespiratory, musculoskeletal, and gastrointestinal) they currently felt. Participants in the anxious mood category reported higher numbers of physical symptoms.

“People could say, ‘Well, you made them anxious –- isn't that going to produce a physiologic reaction, like a pounding heart or sweaty palms?'” Suls said. “But we observed a general increase in all current physical symptoms -– fatigue, for example, which isn't typically a consequence of feeling fearful or nervous.”

Researchers repeated the writing exercise with another group of 120 students -– only this time they asked participants to report both current and retrospective symptoms. on average, people in the anxious group reported five current symptoms, while those in the depressed and neutral groups only reported one or two. Reflecting on the past three weeks, the sad participants reported experiencing seven symptoms on average, while the other groups only recalled about three.

“Making people feel sad didn't influence what they reported feeling at the moment, but it was associated with reporting having had more symptoms in the recent past,” Suls said. “With anxiety, we saw exactly the opposite. They didn't report more symptoms over the past three weeks, but at the moment they reported more.”

Suls and Howren aren't encouraging health care providers to discount symptoms by virtue of the patient's mood. They do, however, encourage medical professionals to be aware that different emotions appear to play into how patients perceive their current and past symptoms.

“Ideally, a doctor would engage with the patient briefly to get a sense whether they're experiencing anxiety or sadness at the time of the visit,” Suls said. “In some cases, it may be worthwhile to ask a significant other what they've observed in terms of symptoms, or to ask the patient to keep a symptom diary to ensure accuracy.”

The age of participants was a limitation of the study, though the authors intentionally chose healthy college students to reduce confounds. other studies indicate that emotional instability (such as depressed or anxious moods) decreases around age 40, so older adults may be less subject to recall or encoding biases associated with physical symptoms. Suls and Howren will focus future symptom-reporting research on older or chronically ill adults.

The research was supported in part by a National Institute on Aging grant awarded to Suls and a post-doctoral fellowship from the VA awarded to Howren.