Creativity, Psychopathology, and Emotion Processing: A Liberal Response Bias for Remembering Negative Information is Associated with Higher Creativity

To what extent do more creative people process emotional information differently than less creative people? This study examined the role of emotion processing in creativity and its implications for the creativity-psychopathology association. A total of 117 participants performed a memory recognition task for negative, positive, and neutral words; they also completed measures of emotion processing, creative achievement, and divergent thinking. Self-reported high creative achievement levels and better performance on divergent thinking tasks were associated with greater perceptual sensitivity for positive words and a more liberal response bias for negative words. Furthermore, mediational analyses revealed a relationship between creativity, emotional repair, and response bias for negative stimuli, whereby a low ability to repair negative emotions served as a mediator between creativity and response bias, with response bias predicting creativity. The significance of these findings is discussed in the context of psychopathology and its possible connection to creativity.