Psychology research paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Psychology research paper - Essay Example (Bruens 1998, 25) Charlotte Perkins Gilman is also believed to have described herself and her own psychopathic state in her story The yellow wallpaper. Many eminently creative individuals have been retrospectively diagnosed with mood disorders, suggesting relationships between creativity and affective disorders. Jamison (1989) described several research paradigms used to study relationships between mood disorders and creativity. A common approach uses historical and biographical studies to provide anecdotal evidence for high rates of affective illness in eminently creative individuals, suggesting artists and writers may have a 2-3-fold more psychosis, mood disorders and suicide compared to people in less creative professions. (Simeonova et. al 2005) Basing on the research conducted by Andreasen who studied for over fifteen years the members of the writing workshop at the Iowa University, K. Jamison who studied 47 British writers and artists, A. M. Ludwig who had done a biographical survey of 1,005 important 20th-century writers, artists and other creative people, etc. M. Ingram states that '[t]he writers had a substantially higher rate of mental illness, predominantly affective, with a tendency towards bipolar attacks'. (Ingram 2001) The study of Guastello et. al showed that cyclothymia is extremely highly represented among creative people. (2004) Different studies have demonstrated "relationships between creativity and bipolar disorder (BD) in individuals, and suggested familial transmission of both creativity and BD". (Simeonova et. al 2005) Hershman and Lieb researched "the often turbulent lives and careers" of talented people, linking their psychological state and manic depression they suffered from to their creativity, and demonstrating "how manic-depressive disorder often becomes the essential difference between talent and genius and offers insights into the obstacles and problems this illness posed for highly creative people in all fields". (Hershman & Lieb 1998) As it can be clearly seen, there are two basic approaches to investigating the psychic states of writers establishing the connection between their creativity and mood disorders, one being based predominantly upon their biographies and other records of their lives, and another - on assessing living creative people. Yet, we presume that one more approach might prove effective as far as researching the link between bipolar disorder and creativity is concerned, and namely - textual analysis of the works of writers. In our research we are planning to concentrate on the works of Virginia Woolf. Modern science being anthropocentric, literary text should be studied taking into account social and psychological peculiarities of its author. Thus, we presume that the evidence for the writer's state can be collected from her texts, above all novels and essays. Manic-depressive disorder is a disease that usually reveals itself in periodic changes of manic and depressive phases separated from each other by