Openness to Experience

Introduction to Openness to Experience

This week's focus: Openness to Experience (or simply, Openness).
Examining its place within the five-factor model.
Understanding what Openness captures.
Exploring why it's considered an independent domain.
Investigating the psychological and biological mechanisms that underpin it.

Learning Outcomes

Define Openness to Experience.
Explain how it's defined in the five-factor model.
Relate it to health and life consequences.
Describe the underlying mechanisms.
Discuss how to assess Openness.

Underpinning Mechanisms of Openness

A goal is to identify psychological or biological mechanisms.
Less consensus and research on Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness compared to other traits.
More speculation involved due to less research.
Active area of interest to understand mechanisms.
The understanding of these mechanisms is subject to change with further research.

Defining Openness

Sample assessment items for measuring Openness:
- Having a rich vocabulary.
- Possessing a vivid imagination.
- Being quick to understand things.
- Using difficult words.
- Reflecting on things.
- Believing in the importance of art.
- Being able to hold high-level conversations.
- Enjoying thinking of new ways to do things.
- Inclination to vote for liberal political candidates.
These items cluster together under the Openness construct.
People endorsing one item tend to endorse others.
This pattern leads to the belief in a single, important dimension: Openness to Experience.
Data-driven approach.
Relates to various aspects of personality.

Characteristics of High and Low Openness

Individuals high on Openness to Experience:
- Perceptive, innovative, curious, creative, imaginative, thoughtful.
- Surround themselves with similar people.
Individuals low on Openness to Experience:
- Literal; take things literally.
- Hold concrete, orthodox beliefs.
- Contrast with those who are higher scores, who may be more metaphorical, enjoy the arts more, and hold less common, less conventional beliefs.

Facets of Openness

Facets as described in the Neo Personality Inventory:
- Openness to fantasy or imagination.
- Openness to aesthetics or artistic interests.
- Openness to feelings or emotionality.
- Openness to ideas or intellect.
- Openness to actions or adventurousness.
- Openness to values or liberalism.
IPIP (International Personality Item Pool) labels provide a slightly different perspective on these facets.

Overlap with Other Traits

Action/Adventurousness seems similar to facets of Extraversion (activity levels, excitement-seeking).
Emotionality is sometimes associated with Neuroticism.
Extroversion and Openness: Linked by plasticity.
Neuroticism is related to Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.

Plasticity and Stability

Condon and colleagues proposed meta-traits above the five factors:
- Plasticity.
- Stability.
Plasticity links Openness and Extraversion.
DeYoung argues that a general tendency towards exploration unifies Openness and Extraversion.

Types of Exploration

Extraversion:
- Behavioral and social exploration.
- Sensitivity to specific rewards.
Openness:
- Cognitive exploration.
- Sensitivity to the reward value of information.

Openness vs. Intellect

DeYoung's Cybernetic Model:
- Distinguishes between Openness and Intellect.
- Openness: Cognitive engagement with perceptual sensory information and artistic/aesthetic interests.
- Intellect: Cognitive engagement with abstract or semantic information and intellectual interests.

Associations with Creativity and Intelligence

Openness: Associated with artistic creativity..
Intellect: Strongly associated with scientific creativity..
Openness: Predicts emotional response to the arts..
Correlated with IQ (around $0.3$ ).
Higher correlation with crystallized intelligence (overall knowledge).
Lower correlation with fluid intelligence (reasoning in the moment).
Openness is an intellectual style or type of curiosity.

Complexity and Controversy in Naming

The complexity of the trait has made it challenging to name.
Various names used over time include intelligence, intellect, and culture.
Core of Openness: A divergent cognitive style that seeks novelty and complexity.
Associates disparate information.

Correlations with Performance and Beliefs

Openness correlates with performance on divergent thinking and creativity tasks.
Associated with paranormal beliefs, unusual experiences, and magical thinking.
Correlation between Openness and DSM Psychoticism dimension.
Link with symptoms of schizo-type personality disorder.

Link Between Mental Health and Creativity

Henry Maudsley's quote: "mankind is indebted for much of its individuality…to individuals with some predisposition to insanity."
Aristotle: "No great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness."
High rate of severe mental health difficulties among eminent creative individuals.

Studies on Relatives of Individuals with Schizophrenia

Studies looked at relatives of individuals with schizophrenia.
Aimed to avoid the confounding effects of schizophrenia itself.
Relatives were overrepresented in listings of eminent people.
They were twice as likely to be in a "Who's Who" listing.
It suggests a genetic link with enhanced creativity.
A genetic relation comes from the same genes that cause mental health issues.
Was conducted in Iceland due to extensive genealogical and mental health records.

Direct Evaluation of Individuals with Mental Health Difficulties

A study compared individuals with:
- Major depressive disorder.
- Bipolar disorder.
- Creative healthy controls.
- Non-creative healthy controls.
Individuals with bipolar disorder and creative controls scored higher on the Baron Welsh Art scale.
Studies often have small sample sizes.

Large-Scale Study Using Swedish Registries

300,000 participants.
Tested the link between creativity and mental health disorders.
Investigated environmental vs. genetic factors.
Looked at the likelihood of holding a creative occupation based on mental health status.
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.
Genetic link underlying the relationship.

Follow-Up Study

Another study used over a million participants.
Investigated whether creativity is associated with all psychiatric disorders or specific ones.
Specifically interested in authors/writers and mental health difficulties.
Creative professions: Scientific or artistic occupations.
Diagnoses included: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, unipolar depression, anxiety disorder, drug abuse, and anorexia nervosa.
Autism and ADHD were categorized as mental illness (note: perspective has since shifted).
The associations are more specific to psychosis when it comes to occupation.
Being an author was associated with increased likelihood of several conditions.
A creative profession was linked to first-degree relatives with some mental health disorders.

The Link to Autism

Review of studies on autism and creativity in the last ten years.
Autistic individuals showed:
- Inhibited fluency and flexibility.
- High level of detail and originality.
Some aspects of creativity are attenuated, while others are enhanced.

Summary of Findings

Many studies found a link between mental health and creativity.
Other studies found no link.
Studies finding no link typically compared individuals with creative professions to healthy controls.
These studies suggest better mental health in creative individuals.
Tension in the literature between studies seeing creativity as optimal and studies linking it to debilitating disorders.

The "Mad Genius" Paradox

Creativity and psychopathology have been both positively and negatively correlated.
The paper suggests the two findings may not be contradictory due to the distribution of creative output (Lacka's Law).
Only those in the minority of "geniuses" most at risk for difficulties.

Lacka's Law

*States that the number of authors making $x$ contributions is $1/x^a$ , where a nearly always equals 2.

States that the number of authors making its contributions in a given period is a fraction of the number making a single contribution, following the formula $1/x^a$ , where a nearly always equals 2.
Most productive individuals are in the vast minority.

The DSM-5 Dimensional Trait Model

Expectation that Psychoticism will align with Openness to Experience.
Study found that Openness and Psychoticism were strongly correlated.
High Openness and creativity without clinical difficulties leads to more mating success.
Openness associated with job changes and cognitive curiosity.
Linked with depression and potentially bipolar disorder more than unipolar depression.
Openness is an important but often overlooked trait.

Mechanisms Underlying Openness

Focus is primarily on potential psychological mechanisms due to less understanding of neurological underpinnings.

Latent Inhibition

Psychological mechanism discovered in the late 1950s.
Pre-exposure to a conditioned stimulus hinders subsequent classical conditioning.
Easier to learn something new than from something familiar.
Believed to be an adaptive biological mechanism.
Capacity of the brain to screen stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant or benign.
Reduces likelihood of developing an aversion or conditioned response to the stimulus.

Latent Inhibition and Psychosis

Reduced or attenuated latent inhibition associated with susceptibility to schizophrenia.
Individuals prone to psychosis show attenuation of latent inhibition.
Study by Lubo and colleagues found reduced latent inhibition in psychosis-prone individuals.

More on Psychosis

2016 study shows similar results:
- Young people (14-29) with no history of psychosis.
- Differing family genetic risk of developing psychosis.
- Those not at greater risk showed a typical differentiation of the pre-exposure and non-exposure groups.
- The measure is of how quickly an association (reaction time) is learned.

Review Article on Latent Inhibition

2020 review article discusses latent inhibition in more detail.
Reviews history and existing human paradigms.
Talks about potential limitations.
Potential biomarker for schizophrenia.

Latent Inhibition Summary

Adaptive mechanism across mammalian species.
Helps filter out irrelevant stimuli.
Individuals with schizophrenia show less latent inhibition.
Associated with high Openness to Experience.
Associated with increased creative achievement in high-IQ individuals

Carson et al. Study (2003)

Conducted with Harvard undergraduate students.
Participants completed:
- Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ).
- Divergent thinking tasks.
- Creative Personality Scale (CPS).
- Latent inhibition paradigm.

Latent Inhibition Task

Auditory task with nonsense syllables.
Participants asked to pay attention to one syllable.
White noise bursts randomly interspersed (target stimulus).
Participants not asked to attend to the bursts.

Test Phase

Participants watch a screen with discs appearing.
Asked to figure out the rule determining when discs appear.
Unbeknownst to participants, yellow discs appear at the offset of white noise bursts.

Second Group

Non-pre-exposure phase instead of pre-exposure.
No white noise bursts.
Test phase is identical to the first group.

Results

Individuals in predisposed condition take longer to figure out the link.
They haven't learned to filter out the white noise first.

Carson and Colleagues Divided Participants

The division used to the creative achievement questionnaire.
Also divided participants into Low/High achievers (on creativity).
Then, those with the low creative achievement score do not make as quick a connection from auditory sound to seeing yellow discs.
Authors asked participants
```
*What have you achieved in your lives?
```

Linking Latent Inhibition and IQ

Divided participants into moderate and high IQ groups.
High Latent Inhibition: Low Creative Achievement.
Low Latent Inhibition + Moderate IQ: Not High Creative Achievement.
Low Latent Inhibition + High IQ: Higher Creative Achievement. The individuals scored better .
*Having it and IQ may facilitate creativity in the context of low latent inhibition.

Deficit in Selective Attention

*If you don't have that kind of filter, it's the kind of thing that would leave us exposed.
*If we don't use that process we're using a cognitive press to filter.
*Low Laying ininhibition and the benefits of high IQ to really derive the benefits from this situation.

Mechanism's Summary

*A greater amount of bettered information that came to the processing.
*The absence of this filter that latent inhibition.
*This increases the odds of combining original creative pieces.
In the context of high IQ then it might be quite a high functioning mechanism, actually.

Latent Inhibition May be risky b/c it causes Sensory Overload

Mainstream Connection

*Prison break

Mechanistic Link Box

*Latent Inhibition
*We were talking fairly well in terms of behavior in psychology (no brain connection), dopamine can be helpful
*Animal research to have exploratory behavior.
*Treatmemnts for Schizophrenia.

    ## Cyberknife Model
    *May be relevant across a lot. The tendency towards all exploration.

Other Measures + Assessments

*The divergence is to think of glasses or brick examples.
*Another test = Torrance test of material
*Materials for creativity are not intuitive.
*Make assessment that help colleagues to evaluate children based on creative thinking.

   ### Fill Task Example

Fill out, draw around and give it a title.

Creative Writing Task

Suppose you could walk on air/fly. What problems could you have? This list is trying to see problems about the ability.

Next Week

We're going to see conscientousness and agreeableness. Look for creative resources and test on mindtap.