A study compared creativity in adults with two forms of ADHD and adults without ADHD. It included 83 adults from the Montreal region, aged 18 to 51. Of these, 43 had no ADHD. Another 21 had the mainly inattentive form (ADHD-I), and 19 had the combined form (ADHD-C). Each person with ADHD had an official diagnosis. No one took ADHD medication on test day.
People rated their own creativity, including an area called Performance. They also took a picture-based creativity test. The combined group rated their Performance creativity higher than both other groups. On the picture test, they scored higher than adults without ADHD on originality and on how abstract their titles were, but not higher than the inattentive group. The inattentive group was not more creative than the others.
Within the combined group, people reporting more hyperactivity tended to rate their Performance creativity higher, a moderate link. No picture-test score was clearly linked to symptom ratings or to a test of holding back responses. The authors concluded the extra creativity seemed tied more to behavioral symptoms than to weaker inhibition.
The authors named the small sample as an important limit. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed recruitment, so planned group sizes were not reached. Few men joined, mainly in the ADHD groups. The groups nearly differed in age by a statistically meaningful margin, though the authors judged this unlikely to have changed the results.
The numbers Stats and what the terms mean
The statistics behind the plain-language claims above.
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: self-rated Performance creativity, average score by group, ADHD-C M = 34.00 (SD 9.18) versus controls 24.00 (7.70) and ADHD-I 26.05 (10.40).
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: overall group difference in Performance creativity, F = 8.49, p = .000, eta squared = .179.
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: Performance creativity gap, controls minus ADHD-C, −10.00 (p = .000).
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: Performance creativity gap, ADHD-I minus ADHD-C, −7.95 (p = .015).
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: picture-test originality, ADHD-C 16.26 (7.29) versus controls 11.16 (4.99), F = 5.41, p = .006, eta squared = .119.
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: picture-test originality, ADHD-I versus ADHD-C, not significant (p = .442).
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: abstractness of titles, ADHD-C 15.47 (7.72) versus controls 11.30 (5.97), F = 3.21, p = .046, eta squared = .074.
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: link between hyperactivity and Performance creativity in the ADHD-C group (N = 19), r = .575, p = .010.
- Girard-Joyal, 2021: how close the groups were in age, p = .053. What the terms mean:
- M the average score in a group.
- SD how spread out the scores were around the average.
- F a test of whether the group averages differ more than chance would explain.
- p how likely a result this large would be by chance alone; under .05 is usually treated as a real difference.
- eta squared the share of the spread in scores explained by which group a person was in.
- r how closely two measures move together, from minus 1 to 1, where 0 means no link. A minus sign shows the direction of the link, not its size.
Source: Girard-Joyal O, Gauthier B. Creativity in the Predominantly Inattentive and Combined Presentations of ADHD in Adults. Journal of Attention Disorders (2021). doi:10.1177/10870547211060547