Direction: Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow it:
Does having a mood disorder make you more creative? That’s the most frequent question I hear about the
relationship. But because we cannot control the instance of a mood disorder (that is, we can’t turn it on and off,
and measure that person’s creativity under both conditions), the question should really be: Do individuals with a
mood disorder exhibit greater creativity than those without? Studies that attempt to answer this question by
comparing the creativity of individuals with a mood disorder against those without, have been well, mixed.
Studies that ask participants to complete surveys of creative personality, behavior or accomplishment, or to
complete divergent thinking measures (where they are asked to generate lots of ideas) often find that
individuals with mood disorders do not differ from those without. However, studies using “creative occupation”
as an indicator of creativity (based on the assumption that those employed in these occupations are relatively
more creative than others) have found that people with bipolar disorders are overrepresented in these
occupations. These studies do not measure the creativity of participants directly, rather they use external
records (such as censuses and medical registries) to tally the number of people with a history of mood
disorders (compared with those without) who report being employed in a creative occupation at some time.
These studies incorporate an enormous number of people and provide solid evidence that people who have
sought treatment for mood disorders are engaged in creative occupations to a greater extent than those who
have not. But can creative occupations serve as a proxy for creative ability?
The creative occupations considered in these studies are overwhelmingly in the arts, which frequently provide
greater autonomy and less rigid structure than the average nine-to-five job. This makes these jobs more
conducive to the success of individuals who struggle with performance consistency as the result of a mood
disorder. The American psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig has suggested that the level of emotional expressiveness
required to be successful in various occupations creates an occupational drift and demonstrated that the
pattern of expressive occupations being associated with a greater incidence of psychopathology is a self repeating pattern. For example, professions in the creative arts are associated with greater psychopathology
than professions in the sciences whereas, within creative arts professions, architects exhibit a lower lifetime
prevalence rate of psychopathology than visual artists and, within the visual arts, abstract artists exhibit lower
rates of psychopathology than expressive artists. Therefore, it is possible that many people who suffer from
mood disorders gravitate towards these types of professions, regardless of creative ability or inclination.
Go through the following:
1.Mood disorders do not lead to creativity
2.The flexibility of creative occupations makes them more appealing to people with mood disorder
3.Mood swings in creative professions is less prevalent than in non-creative professions
Which of the following would undermine the passage’s main argument?