Scholarship for Hope Grant-Funded Research
The Sean Costello Memorial Fund for Bipolar Research provides grant funding for a two-university project focused on the mechanisms driving bipolar creativity. While research has provided exceptionally strong evidence that those with bipolar disorder, and their family members, are more likely to be creative than the general population, little is known about why that might be.
Following up on years of collaboration inspired by the Sean Costello Memorial Fund for Bipolar Research, researchers at the University of California (UC) Berkeley and the University of British Columbia (UBC) are coming together again to try to understand links between bipolar disorder and creativity. With funding from the Sean Costello fund, Sheri Johnson (UC) and Erin Michalak (UBC) are joined by their colleagues Manon Ironside (UC) and Luke Clark (UBC).
The focus of the grant is on understanding whether motivation can help explain the high levels of creativity observed in bipolar disorder. More specifically, researchers will focus on understanding responses to potential rewards. Early work by this team has shown that those with bipolar disorder show a high level of investment in earning rewards in life, and that his appears to be correlated with levels of creativity accomplishment.
The team will use new tools from neurocognitive science to assess whether people with bipolar disorder are more willing to work hard for a potential reward, and whether they are more willing to explore the unknown in search for reward. For this study, researchers will work with people diagnosed with bipolar disorder and a comparison sample of those without bipolar disorder. Recruitment will include outreach to highly creative individuals who are part of musical and artistic schools and centers. Each participant will complete measures of creativity (including engagement in a creative occupation, lifetime creative accomplishment, and laboratory tests of ability to solve creativity puzzles), as well as measures related to exploration and willingness to work hard in situations with the potential for reward. Along with those measures, the researchers will also assess the history and current status of bipolar disorder, as well as treatments.
Each participant will likely spend several hours working with the team, to provide in-depth information about these key questions. The group is excited to bring together expertise from different scientific perspectives to solve this puzzle. Understanding more about the types of processes that support creativity will be of major importance in guiding treatment. If, for example, researchers learn that one of the advantages that fosters creativity for those with bipolar disorder is an exceptional willingness to work toward reward, this behavioral process could be tracked in treatment.
Because a fair amount is known about the neural underpinnings of the willingness to work hard for reward, this type of finding could also help point toward new treatment approaches. The research group is very excited to have the support of the Sean Costello Memorial Fund for Bipolar Research. The funding will enable payments to participants and equipment needed to conduct the tests. Without those resources, the research would not be possible. The team hopes to share new insights next year from the study findings in the form of peer-reviewed publications. Over the shorter term, they will be blogging on their progress and insights again, so stay tuned!
