Twin study links artistic, but not scientific, creativity to poorer mental health
· Medical Xpressby Ingrid Fadelli, Medical Xpress
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The relationship between creativity and mental health has attracted the interest of many psychologists over the past decades. Some past studies have found that creativity is sometimes linked to mental health difficulties, while others collected opposing or inconsistent results.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Karolinska Institutet and other institutions recently set out to further explore the relationship between creativity and mental health by analyzing questionnaire results collected from thousands of twins living in Sweden. Their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that this link is greatly influenced by how creativity is measured, which could explain why earlier studies reached conflicting conclusions.
"There is a longstanding idea that genius and 'madness' go hand in hand, particularly in creative fields, with many famous artists believed to have struggled with mental health problems," Miriam A. Mosing, co-senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.
"However, the empirical evidence for this association remains mixed. We examined this question for the first time using a highly comprehensive data set, combining longitudinal and genetically informative data with multiple indicators of creativity and both self-reported and registry-based measures of mental health."
Analyzing data collected from thousands of Swedish twins
Mosing and her colleagues analyzed data collected as part of two surveys run in 2012–2013 and 2022–2023, respectively. These data were collected from a total of 14,658 individual twins living in Sweden, 6,419 of whom participated in both surveys.
The surveys assessed the twins' achievement in various artistic fields, including music, writing, dance, theater and visual arts, as well as science and invention. In addition, the surveys asked participants to report their occupations and psychiatric symptoms and assessed their openness to experience.
The second survey also assessed the respondents' divergent thinking, the ability to come up with various ideas or possible solutions when presented with a problem. Specifically, participants were asked to name 10 words as different in meaning from one another as possible.
"We first explored the longitudinal association between creativity and mental health, or in simpler terms, if earlier creativity predicts later mental health, and if earlier mental health predicts later creativity," explained Mosing. "We also examined the association in identical twins (i.e., twins sharing almost all genes and rearing environment) to test if the association would remain after excluding the genetic and environmental effects shared within each pair of identical twins."
In their analyses, the researchers looked at differences in the creativity, self-reported mental health symptoms and psychiatric diagnoses (recorded in Swedish medical records) of identical twins. The researchers measured creativity in both artistic and scientific domains, while also looking at participants' occupations, openness to experience and scores on the divergent thinking test.
"To assess mental health, we considered the diagnoses of multiple psychiatric disorders (e.g., bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder) and self-reported questionnaires," said Penghao Xia, first author of the paper. "We then tried to understand if genes play a role in this association. For this purpose, we tested if participants' genetic risk of mental disorders could predict their creativity scores, and if their genetic propensity of creativity could predict their mental health."
A complex relationship beyond cause and effect
The researchers found that the Swedish twins' artistic creativity was linked to poorer mental health. Scientific creativity, on the other hand, was not significantly linked to most mental health conditions, with only some measures linked to fewer mental health difficulties.
"We found higher artistic creativity to be associated with somewhat more mental health problems, and genes play an important role in this association," said Xia. "More studies are needed to understand how artistic creativity and mental health are linked. Though our study suggested the importance of genes, it doesn't mean environment is not important. Therefore, we still need to investigate other explanations of the association."
The researchers found that influences genetically inherited by the twins and shared across the examined traits contributed to the associations they observed. They also observed that earlier depressive symptoms predicted greater openness to experience at a later stage, even in comparisons between identical twins. This suggests a possible causal relationship between depressive symptoms and openness, although future studies are needed to confirm this.
Overall, the team's results suggest that research focusing on the link between creativity and mental health should not treat all creative inclinations the same way. This is because combining different forms of creativity, such as artistic and scientific creativity, could obscure meaningful differences between the two.
"The role of genes in the association we observed needs more exploration," added Mosing. "As part of future research, we need to figure out which genes, through which mechanisms, drive the association between artistic creativity and mental health."
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Publication details
Penghao Xia et al., Unraveling the multifaceted relationship between creativity and mental health with longitudinal analyses of genotyped twins, Molecular Psychiatry (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-026-03925-5.
Journal information: Molecular Psychiatry
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PsychiatryPsychology & Mental health Who's behind this story?
Ingrid Fadelli
Freelance journalist with BSc Psychology and MA International Journalism. Covers AI, robotics, neuroscience, and astrophysics since 2018. Full profile →
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