To feel is to create?
A new research study has found that emotionally ambivalent people-those who feel both positive and negative emotions simultaneously-are more creative than those who are happy, sad, or who experience no emotion. Professor Christina Ting Fong at the University of Washington suggests that when people experience mixed emotions, they are signaled to interpret the situation as unusual and respond to it by using their creative thinking abilities. It had previously been shown that women in supervisory positions are more likely to be emotionally ambivalent, suggesting that these women are more creative managers. Two studies were conducted by Fong. In the first, college students were asked to write about certain life experiences and were then made to complete the Remote Associates Test, a common measure of creativity. The second involved showing students either a film clip in which a young woman expresses her ambivalence towards growing older, or a dull screen saver, and were then asked to write the Remote Associates Test. Both studies showed that those who had been exposed to more emotionally ambivalent experiences were more creative than those who had experienced happy, sad, or unemotional materials.
Source: University of Washington news service
-Abigail Slinger
Let loose the LSD!
By perusing old psychiatric records of the ’50s and ’60s, University of Alberta history of medicine professor Dr. Erika Dyck has unearthed research findings indicating that a single dose of LSD, provided in a nurturing environment, can be an effective treatment for alcoholism. Having noted similarities between the experiences of LSD users and those going through delirium tremens (DTs), often marked as “rock bottom” in the treatment of alcoholics, psychiatrists of the time hypothesized that a dose of LSD might be able to mimic the behavior-changing effects of DTs without engendering their more painful, physical effects. Dyck studied several of the researchers’ private and published papers and interviewed some of their patients, many of whom had not had any alcohol since their LSD treatment in the 1960s. One study, published in 1962, stated that some 65 per cent of the alcoholics treated with LSD had stopped drinking for at least a year and a half after just one dose of LSD, compared to 25 per cent treated with group therapy, and less than 12 per cent treated with traditional psychotherapy techniques. At the time, the study’s unconventional findings received much skepticism among psychiatric professionals.
Source: Social History of Medicine
-A.S.
