Chaos Rainbows

Chapter 4 provides an examination of the common states of mind arising out of openness, including schizotypy, reduced latent inhibition, and cognitive disinhibition. The chapter reconstructs a frame of mind artists themselves have a hard time describing. From there, questions center on the shaping, the organizing, and the ordering involved in art-making. Most of the chapter is dedicated to chaos and its roots in personality. But chaos alone isn’t enough. Creativity is making something. Chaos is a means to that end, the making. How the artist uses chaos is just as important as finding ways to stay open to it. Numerous artists are used as illustrations, including Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Jobs, and Joni Mitchell. A four-step model for how raw materials get shaped into art is also presented.

Cognitive disinhibition and socioemotional functioning in Alzheimer's disease

Individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) experience difficulties with socioemotional functioning, and it has been proposed that cognitive disinhibition may be one potential mechanism that contributes to difficulties in this area. To test this possibility, twenty individuals with AD and 20 demographically matched controls were administered self-report measures of depression, emotion regulation and empathy, in addition to a behavioral measure that has proven to be very sensitive to inhibitory failures (the Hayling Sentence Completion Test). Relative to controls AD participants exhibited increased inhibitory failures on the Hayling, and self-reported significantly reduced cognitive empathy, but did not differ with respect to affective empathy, depression or perceived capacity for emotion regulation. Controlling for general cognitive status, in the AD (but not the control) group, reduced cognitive inhibition was associated with lower levels of depression. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. (JINS, 2007, 13, 1060–1064.)