ABSTRACT
Verbal intelligence was also assessed in the London Block by the Definitions and Synonyms scales of the Mill Hill Vocabulary Test, Form 1 Senior (1977 and 1994 revisions; Raven 1976; Raven et al. 1994). As it is generally felt that creativity shows little or no relation with intelligence above an IQ of 120 (Canter 1973; Heansley and Reynolds 1989), the data presented in Chadwick (1988, 1992) were therefore reanalysed to compute the correlations between creativity and psychoticism 2,3 for those participants scoring higher than this in intelligence. The data of 21 subjects were extracted. Their mean Mill Hill score scaled by age as a percentile was 90.99 per cent with a range from 78 to 97 per cent. This is clearly a very high verbal IQ sample. In the London Block we are therefore looking, as did Woody and Claridge (1977) with Oxford undergraduate and postgraduate volunteers, at the correlations between creativity and psychoticism of schizophrenic style2 at a level of IQ where intelligence should complicate the picture less. (It is worth noting here, however, that the highest scores in the whole 1988 sample on the Mill Hill were actually provided by a recovering male psychotic and by a female who was the highest Neuroticism scorer on the N scale of the EPQ.)
In the second experiment many participants were Open University mature students of high grades resident in the Cambridge-Anglia region of that establishment. This investigation I will therefore refer to as ‘the Cambridge Block’. Again, participants with high IQ were recruited (N = 42), their scores being checked by the use of the Synonyms scale of the Mill Hill. (It was found in 1988 that this scale correlated +0.94 with the Definitions scale of that test and was considerably quicker to administer (Chadwick 1988, p. 296).) The volunteers also were asked to complete the STQ of Claridge and Broks (1984) and Jackson and Claridge (1991). This scale assesses schizotypal tendencies via the STA scale and borderline personality tendencies (in the medical sense of the term (DSM III, 1980)) via the STB scale. Factor analysis of the STA (Hewitt and Claridge 1989) revealed three distinct factors referred to as ‘magical ideation’, ‘unusual perceptual experiences’ and ‘paranoid ideation and suspiciousness’. In the
Test r phi t p (one tailed) df S test (Fluency) +0.344 2.744 <0.005 56
Uses (Fluency) +0.401 3.280 =0.001 56
Uses (Originality) +0.228 1.753 <0.05 56
2-3 score +0.227 1.757 <0.05 57
3-4 score +0.274 2.128 <0.025 56
DCT (Originality) +0.113 0.859 NS 57
present experiment scores on these components will also be computed and related to creativity. By subtracting scores on the paranoia component of the STA scale from the total STA score a measure of ‘non-paranoid phenomena’ will also be obtained to see whether the paranoid or the nonparanoid scores correlate more highly with creativity. On the basis of the work of Keefe and Magaro (1980) and of Chadwick (1992) on the full London Block sample it would be expected that paranoid tendencies are detrimental to divergent thinking styles of creativity.
