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Creativity and Psychopathology Essay

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Creativity and Psychopathology Recent studies show that your chances of having a mental illness may have something to do with your profession. This is an example of a subject that can often be read about in popular magazines such as Vogue, Time, or Newsweek. I’ve never really paid much attention to these articles because something about them makes me feel uneasy. The reader must remember that the magazines have more than one goal. Not only are they trying to inform readers, but they are also trying to sell magazines. I recently read an article in Psychology Today entitled Troubled Talent. It reports the results of a study on the prevalence of mental illness among various professions. I will compare this article with an actual …show more content…

The article does not provide information on how the subjects were chosen, their age, race or gender. Since we do not know how the subjects were chosen, it is not possible to determine whether the experiment was a quasi or a true experiment. Not only does the article fail to provide important information on the sample, it also lacks information pertaining to the study’s methods. We can, however, infer that he study must have been correlational. This is because neither mental illness nor type of profession can be manipulated as an independent variable and causation cannot be established. Only by inference do we know that the study is retrospective. Since the subjects must have lived a large portion of their lives in order to see patterns of creativeness and mental illness, we can assume that the researchers needed to look back at records to gather their information. We do not know anything else about how information on the subjects was collected or evaluated. Because of the limited sample and method information, ethical issues may be present, but are not apparent. Talan’s limited account of Ludwig’s study makes it appear to be unreliable. The article mentions the results of Ludwig’s study, but we don’t know what they really mean because we don’t know enough about the sample or the design. Since we don’t know much about the sample, the study’s reliability is

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