A team of psychologists has suggested a new model for neuroticism that could explain its links to both unhappiness and creativity – that the personality trait arises through overthinking.

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People who display symptoms of neuroticism have a tendency to be in a negative emotional state but can also exhibit great creativity.

The new theory is presented in an article published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

“We’re still a long way off from fully explaining neuroticism, and we’re not offering all of the answers, but we hope that our new theory will help people make sense of their own experiences, and show that although being highly neurotic is by definition unpleasant, it also has creative benefits,” says lead author Adam Perkins, of King’s College London in the UK.

Neuroticism is a long-term tendency to be in a negative emotional state. People who score highly on neuroticism in personality tests are particularly sensitive to environmental stress and do not respond well to it. As a result, they can struggle to cope with dangerous jobs and are more likely than others to experience psychiatric disorders.

One of the most well-received explanations of neuroticism was proposed by the psychologist Jeffrey Gray, who suggested people with neuroticism have a heightened sensitivity to threat. However, Perkins identifies a number of problems with this theory.

“It’s pretty difficult to explain neuroticism in terms of magnified threat perception because high scorers often feel unhappy in situations where there is no threat at all,” he explains.

“The second problem is, there’s literature showing neuroticism scores are positively correlated with creativity; and so why should having a magnified view of threat objects make you good at coming up with new ideas?”

Inspiration for the new theory came from research demonstrating that when people spontaneously have negative thoughts, they exhibit greater activity in the regions of the brain associated with threat perception – the medial prefrontal cortex.

Other research also showed that, as a source of threat moves closer, activity in the brain switches from activity related to anxiety in the forebrain to activity related to panic in the midbrain. This switch is controlled by the basolateral nuclei of the amygdala.

Perkins states that if high levels of spontaneous activity associated with negative thoughts occur in the area of the brain that governs threat perception, and if a person has a tendency to panic sooner than other people due to possessing especially high reactivity in the basolateral nuclei of the amygdala, it could be possible to experience negative emotions even in the absence of threat.

“This could mean that for specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active imagination, which acts as a built-in threat generator,” Perkins explains.

Co-author Danilo Arnone, also of the Department of Psychological Medicine at King’s College London, argues that their new model for neuroticism could help explain the thinking pattern observed in depression. In addition, the model works alongside previously identified brain activity in mood dysregulation.

“Hopefully our theory will also stimulate new research as it provides us with a straightforward unifying framework to tie together the creative aspects of neuroticism with its emotional aspects,” Perkins concludes.

The researchers refer to Isaac Newton – a highly creative individual who showed many signs of neuroticism – as an indicator of their new solution:

I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.”

Here, his words describe creativity as a product of intensely focused and prolonged thinking, a level of overthinking that the researchers believe may have underpinned his neurotic symptoms as well as his creativity.

Recently, Medical News Today reported on a study that suggests individuals with traits of autism may have more advanced creativity skills than those without such traits.