The relationship between psychoticism, trait-creativity and the attentional mechanism of cognitive inhibition

The present study was designed in order to test the hypothesis that there is a link among psychoticism, cognitive traits associated with creativity (i.e Divergent Thinking), and the attentional mechanism of cognitive inhibition. A sample of 37 subjects was tested using the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, the Wallach-Kogan Divergent Thinking (DT) tests and a ‘negative priming’ experimental task as a measure of cognitive inhibition. It was hypothesized that subjects who score highly on the psychoticism scale of the EPQ would perform better on the creativity tasks compared with low-P scorers. In addition, it was hypothesized that high-P scorers and also high DT scorers would both show a reduced negative priming effect i.e. reduced ability to inhibit stimulation from the environment. The correlations of P-scores with the creativity scores were positive and most of them significant, indicating that subjects who score highly on psychoticism also produce a larger number of responses and give more unique answers on the DT items. In addition, high-P scorers showed a reduced negative priming effect compared with low-P scorers, and this difference was statistically significant. Finally, subjects who scored highly on the DT test showed a smaller negative priming effect compared with low-creativity scorers, but this effect did not reach statistical significance.