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Existing research has consistently supported a relationship between creative achievement and specific personality traits (e.g. openness to experience). However, such work has largely focused on univariate associations, potentially obscuring complex interactions among multiple personality factors, rendering an incomplete picture of the creative personality. We applied a psychometric network approach to characterize the multidimensional personality structure of highly creative individuals in the arts ("artists") and sciences ("scientists"), using data from three samples (N = 4,015): college students, a representative adult sample, and the Big-C project of eminent creative professionals. Replicating past work, we found that artists showed reliably higher levels of openness to experience compared to scientists and a control group of less creative people. Psychometric network analysis revealed that artists were characterized by higher connectivity (i.e. co-occurrence) with other personality traits for openness, indicating that openness may be more heterogeneous in how it co-occurs with other personality traits in highly creative people. Across all three samples, we found that the scientists' personality network structure was more cohesive than the personality network of artists and the control group, indicating greater homogeneity in the personality characteristics of scientists. Our findings uncover a constellation of traits that give rise to creative achievement in the arts and sciences.

Imagination, often celebrated for its role in creativity and development, also may be a feature in a range of personality pathology and psychopathology. This pre-registered study evaluates the relationship between imagination and maladaptive personality traits using the Four-Factor Imagination Scale and Personality Inventory for DSM-5. Large-scale, multinational, cross-sectional data (N = 114,559) were collected from the SAPA-Project using a planned-missingness design. Functional sample size (pairwise-n = 600) was derived from the mean number of pairwise-complete administrations of all items. Significant associations were found between imagination and PID-5 facets saturated with negative affect and psychoticism. Extreme groups analysis demonstrated participants with non-normative levels of PID-5 Depressivity and Anxiousness had elevated levels of emotionally negative imagination (mean d = 1.14, p < .001); non-normative Perceptual Dysregulation and Emotional Lability featured greater overall imaginative activity (mean d = 1.00, p < .001). Item-level analyses using machine learning revealed the content of PID-5 items predicted facet-level imagination scores, suggesting imagination features in some pathological traits. All statistical analyses are reproducible and publicly available in the Supplemental Materials file. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has investigated the nature of imagination as a construct related to multiple forms of higher-order cognition. Despite the emergence of various conceptualizations of imagination, few attempts have been made to explore the structure of imagination as a trait in the context of existing hierarchically-nested personality dimensions. We present the Dual Facet Imagination Scale (DFIS) for measuring trait imagination that distinguishes between experiential simulation and conceptual innovation, aligned with the two major subfactors (aspects) of the Big Five dimension Openness/Intellect. In two samples (N = 210 & 5771), we provide evidence of a consistent factor structure distinguishing experiential and conceptual descriptions of imagination, as well as validity as measures of facets of Openness and Intellect. The DFIS provides a trait measure of two major forms of imagination in line with mainstream models of the hierarchical structure of personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]