Openness to Experience

Openness to Experience (or Openness)

• This week's topic: Openness to experience (or just openness).
• Exploration of how openness fits into the five-factor model.
• Discussion of what openness captures, its independence as a domain, and its underpinning factors in dispositions.

Learning Outcomes

• Define openness to experience.
• Explain its definition within the five-factor model.
• Discuss its relationship to health and life consequences.
• Describe the underlying mechanisms.
• Outline methods for assessing openness.

Underlying Mechanisms

• Goal: Identify psychological or biological mechanisms for openness.
• Note: Less consensus and research compared to other traits like extroversion and neuroticism.
• Area of active research with evolving understanding.

Defining Openness to Experience

• Sample assessment items:
  • Rich vocabulary
  • Vivid imagination
  • Quick to understand things
  • Use of difficult words
  • Reflection on things
  • Belief in the importance of art
  • Ability to hold elevated conversations
  • Statements like "I love to think of new ways of doing things" and "I tend to vote for liberal political candidates."
• These items cluster together under the openness construct in correlation matrices.
• High endorsement of one item correlates with high endorsement of others, and vice versa.
• This pattern supports the idea of a single dimension called openness to experience within the five-factor model.
• Data-driven approach with ongoing study to understand its relation to personality.

Characteristics of High and Low Openness

• High openness:
  • Surrounded by perceptive, innovative, curious, creative, imaginative, and thoughtful individuals.
  • Described by adjectives like those above.
• Low openness:
  • Described as literal.
  • Hold concrete, orthodox beliefs.
  • Contrast between metaphorical, art-enjoying, and unconventional beliefs of higher scorers.

Facets of Openness

• Facets described in the Neo Personality Inventory

  • Listed facets as described in the Neo Personality Inventory and the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).

• Neo labels for facets:

  • Fantasy or imagination
  • Aesthetics or artistic interests
  • Feelings or emotionality
  • Ideas or intellect
  • Actions or adventurousness
  • Values or liberalism

• IPIP labels provide an alternative perspective, potentially making facets easier to understand.

Overlaps with Other Traits

• Action/adventurousness facets resemble extroversion (activity levels, excitement-seeking).
• Emotionality facet relates to neuroticism.
• Overlap exists, particularly between extroversion and openness, possibly linked to the "Big Two" traits and the Young cybernetic model.
• Extroversion and openness are linked by "plasticity".

Plasticity and Exploration

• Plasticity reflects a general tendency towards exploration.
• Openness involves cognitive exploration.
• Extroversion involves environmental/social exploration and sensitivity to rewards.
• Openness involves sensitivity to the reward value of information.
• Commonality: general tendency towards exploration, differing in the type of exploration.

Openness vs. Intellect

• Young's cybernetic model differentiates between openness and intellect.

• Neo/Big Five refers to it as openness to experience.

• Young subdivides openness into two aspects: Openness and Intellect.

  • Openness: Cognitive engagement with perceptual/sensory information, artistic/aesthetic interests.
  • Intellect: Engagement with abstract/semantic information and intellectual interests.

• Openness is associated with artistic creativity, while intellect is associated with scientific creativity.

• Openness predicts emotional response to artistic experiences.

Openness and Intelligence

• Openness is not just intelligence.
• Correlation between openness and IQ is about $.3$ (substantial but not huge).
• Crystallized intelligence (overall knowledge) has slightly higher correlation than fluid intelligence (reasoning ability).
• Openness aligns with intellectual style, a type of curiosity distinct from intellectual ability (IQ).

Complexity and Controversy of the Trait

• Trait is complex with potential dissociation as noted by Young (openness vs. intellect).
• Naming of the trait has been controversial due to its complexity.
• Different systems have used various names, including intelligence, intellect, and culture.
• Costa and McCrae labeled it openness in 1985, and their Neo five-factor model name has been successful.
• Core of openness: divergent cognitive style, seeking novelty and complexity.
• People high on openness make associations between disparate domains.

Correlates of Openness

• Measured through self-report, divergent thinking tasks, and creativity tasks.
• Performance on these tasks relates to personality inventory ratings.
• Divergent thinking task: Generating multiple uses for an object (e.g., a brick) within a time limit.
• Semantic distance task: Rating closeness in meaning between seemingly unrelated concepts (e.g., zebra stripes and trees).
• Individuals high on openness tend to see distant meanings as more connected, showing a tendency to make new associations rapidly.

Associations with Paranormal Beliefs and Schizotypal Traits

• High openness correlates with paranormal beliefs, unusual experiences, and magical thinking.
• Association between openness and the DSM's psychoticism dimension and symptoms of schizotypal personality disorder.

Life and Health Consequences: Creativity and Mental Health

• Link between mental health difficulties and creativity; indirectly related to openness.
• Historical perspectives:
  • Henry Maudsley: Individuality and genius may be linked to predisposition to insanity.
  • Aristotle: No great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness.

Studies on Creativity and Mental Health

• Early approach: Examining creative geniuses (e.g., Beethoven) and noting high rates of mental health issues.
• Studies on relatives of individuals with schizophrenia:
  • Relatives have increased probability of being considered eminent, particularly in artistic or scholastic fields.
  • Supports the idea of a genetic link between mental health difficulties and enhanced creativity.
  • Conducted in Iceland due to extensive genealogical and mental health records.
• Direct approach: Evaluating individuals with mental health difficulties.
  • Study comparing individuals with depression, bipolar disorder, creative controls, and non-creative controls.
  • Individuals with bipolar disorder and creative controls scored higher on artistic creativity measures.
• Large-scale study (300,000 people) using Swedish registries:
  • Investigated the link between creativity and mental health disorders and whether the relationship is due to environmental or genetic factors.
  • Individuals with bipolar disorder and healthy siblings of individuals with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were overrepresented in creative professions.
  • Individuals with schizophrenia had an increased rate of artistic occupations.
• Authors concluded a genetic component underlies the relationship.
• Forest plots visually represent these associations.
• Closer relatives to patients had solid effects.

Follow-Up Study and Findings

• Larger study with over a million participants using population registers aimed to investigate if creativity is associated with all psychiatric disorders, or is it restricted to disorders with features of psychosis like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
• Creative professions were scientific or artistic occupations.
• Individuals with creative professions were not more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than controls, with the exception of those with bipolar disorder.
• Being an author was associated with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, unipolar depression, anxiety disorder, substance abuse, and suicide.
• Association between having a creative profession and being a first-degree relative of an individual with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anorexia, or autism.
• Evidence suggests links between some mental health disorders and creativity.

Autism and Creativity

• Systematic review of studies on autism and creativity:
  • Autistic individuals showed inhibited fluency and flexibility, but high levels of detail and originality.
  • Creativity in autism is a complex story.
  • Some aspects of creativity may be attenuated, but there is an increased tendency towards increased level of detail and sensitivity and increased originality.

Summary of Studies on Mental Health and Creativity

• Many studies have found a link between mental health disorders and creativity, whereas other studies have not.
• Studies show individuals with creative professions have better mental health compared to relatively healthy controls.
• Contrasts with studies suggesting that being highly creative may be linked to debilitating disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
• Tension in the literature due to conflicting findings.

The "Mad Genius" Paradox

• Studies have found a positive correlation as well as negative correlations.
• Studies are conflicting and confusing because of the presence of positive and negative results.

Resolution of the Paradox

• Findings don't need to be contradictory.
• Difference between people who produce one creative output vs. those who are highly prolific.
• Only a small minority of creative "geniuses" are highly productive and at risk for severe mental health difficulties.
• These individuals drive the finding that highly creative people are more at risk for mental health issues.
• Less creative individuals drive the finding that creative individuals tend to have better mental health.
• What part of the distribution being observed will affect the potential result.

Naka's Law

• Alfred James Naka: Laws does not mean binary contribution to Infometrics law, to consider the quantities of authors and papers and measure the relationship between them. After collecting a considerable amount of data, simply could not.
  The law says that as the number of articles published increases, all those producing that fake publications become less frequent than one fourth, as many authors publishing two articles within a specified time period as there are single publication authors one night as many publishing three articles, 1/16 as many publishing four articles, etc.

• The small group of highly creative people are the most productive and also the most at risk for experiencing severe mental health difficulties.

DSM Dimensional Trait Model and Psychoticism

• Expectation that the dimension of psychoticism aligns with openness to experience.
• One study found that openness fell on the same factor as psychoticism. i.e. strongly correlated, suggesting a relationship between the two.
• High openness and creativity without clinical difficulties correlated with mating success.
• Openness is important, though often overlooked in favor of extroversion and neuroticism.

Summary

• Openness encompasses different aspects of our being.

Latent Inhibition

• To talk about potential mechanisms for openness, including psychological mechanisms.

• Define latent inhibition

• Easier to learn something new than something familiar.

Latent Inhibition Mechanism

• Discovered in the late 1950s in animal literature.

• Pre-exposure to a conditioned stimulus hinders subsequent classical conditioning involving the stimulus.

• Disruption of normal classical conditioning due to pre-exposure.

  • Best known through Pavlov's dog. You've got food, um, and that naturally, um, creates an unconditioned response of salivation. Um, then you got a bell that does nothing. And then when you put the food and the bell together and multiple times, uh, you will eventually get a response, a conditioned response, uh, responding to the bell, which is the conditioned stimulus in absence of the food.

  • In the first case of the trial that had a lot of positive exposure to the dentist, uh, that then experienced a negative event. That negative event is less likely to then create a conditioned response, or aversion, or fear is less likely to become a conditioned response.

• Observed across many species; believed to be an adaptive biological mechanism.

• Varying capacity of the brain to screen stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant or benign.

• Screening reduces likelihood of developing a conditioned response.

• Reduced or attenuated latent inhibition is associated with susceptibility to schizophrenia.

• Individuals prone to psychosis show attenuation of latent inhibition.

Studies on Latent Inhibition

• Individuals prone to psychosis show reduced latent inhibition
• Young people at greater risk showed a typical inhibition, normal ability to, uh, filter out information.

Latent Inhibition and Openness

• Individuals high on the trait of openness to experience may show less latent inhibition.
• Having attenuated latent inhibition has been associated with increased creative achievement in high IQ individuals.

Carson et al. Study (2003)

• Conducted in Harvard undergraduates.
• Participants completed Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ), divergent thinking tasks, and Creative Personality Scale.
• Also completed a latent inhibition paradigm.
• Task divided up into auditory task, and visual task

Creative Achievement Questionnaire

• Asks about the number of lifetime creative achievements of the individual.
• The study did reveal the retest reliability.

Creative Personality Scale.

• It asks about the trait rating for personality

Latent Inhibition Task Procedure

• 30 nonsense syllables are being presented one at a time into the headphones, and the participants were just listening to these sequences of nonsense syllables.
• They were asked to pay particular attention to one of these syllables whenever they came up.
• While they were listening, they would also hear white noise.

Pre-exposure Phase

• Participants were exposed to white noise bursts without being relevant or important.

Test Phase

• Listening to same nonsense syllables as first phase. Little disc. Appear on Screen
  They were asked to try an figure out if there was a rule to where the discs appear - key is discs appeared at offset of White Noise Bersts.

Procedure for 2nd Group of Participants

• 1st does a non exposure phase.
  • Exactly similar to first group except there is no white noise
• 2nd phase - Identical.

Outcome

• Important is how long to figure out the rule

Results

• Individuals who are in pre disposed Condition take longer to figure out
• Participants from Group to quicker at finding the link between stimulus and result (Yellow Disc) as they didn't develop pre-programmed white noise stimulus response.

Lugo Again

• Lowest Latent and have normal inbition
• High Scored have a lower value.

Key Conclusion of These Actions

• Show attenuation of Inhiobition.

Study One - Participants put into 2 Groups

• The High Creative Achievement Group didn't really have the inhibition that they pre-exposed to White Noise burst.
  • Others also done this.

Harvard, 2000, asked participants What had they achieved in their lives

• High High Achivers show this attenuation.
  • Less latent inhibition in this task versus the lower achievers..

Other IQ Tests were performed to see what results occurred here.

• There wasn't really any individual with low IQ.
  Then, test whether Latent Inhibition & Creative Achievement, can occur within IQ groupings. People with typical Hight Latent Inhibition - Tend to have Low Creative Achievements

However

• For Lower, no Achievement - but for high, their creativity achievement shows a higher score than had there not been previous Latent Intibition.
  As those low latency with High IQ, allowed high creativity - there were not any over- whemlness as the process of filtering, processing can occur naturally with high IQ.

• A larger amount of information had during processing.

High level of creativity benefits include better combinations, originality

• Lower lying Inhibtion, risk, negative results within Low IQ levels and it makes everything more difficult.

Low latency, in terms of High IQ can be enhanced.

• If processing for low volume can be difficult, can be mental - schizophrenia if lower quality in the process than creativity is not possible.
  It enables what is original as you might need with High IQ for these results to occur. There is lots without processing is very over-running.

Essentially

• Low Level latency facilitates greater volume information.

Diagram

• Show the various aspects and their relationship together. The potential is there that can occur otherwise there can be issues that lead to more cognitive issues and there is the separation.

Mainstream Information

• Prison Break - has it occurred is there more volume in mainstream. TV show.

Latent Inhibition Mechanism

• It is a point where related to potential, but may also link to dopamine.
  Consistent and link with Exploratory, Biological studies and less inhibitory.
  For people with Scz patients, often treat that is a blocker.
  Colin Young- both over lapping from Dopamine in Exploratory side and Social as weel
  Is Dopamine, the Key for Cognitive Value for people
  This potentially to linked and great advantages, can be potentially in context so it related to connect, the great and connecting of divergent - can be in addition to create potential more potential advantages. So the potential is can be disabled however. May need more behaviour or physcology.

Measuring Openness

• We can use Questionnaires, and that can be a tactic.
• Looking at Divergent and Creative Thinking as well.

Looking at the Torrance Test. Figure Task - Picture.

• Then try to create variation as what and where their point.

Additional Options.

• Those Questions include what issues or problems can results
• Can have the questions to see what that can show what is needed.

End.

• Next week - conscientation and aggregation