The Role of Gender, Overexcitabilities and ADHD in Predicting Creativity in Lebanese Highschool Students

Abstract

The relationship between overexcitabilities (OE) and creativity remains inconclusive based on the few available empirical studies in the literature. Similarly, while some claim that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more creative than their peers without ADHD, others do not agree with that claim. Furthermore, some researchers believe that the potential to misdiagnose creative children with ADHD exists due to the similarity of the symptoms of ADHD with the behavioral manifestations of OEs that are higher in creative children. Due to the controversy in the literature surrounding those claims, and the paucity of empirical research in Lebanon investigating them, the researcher proposes a study that aims to examine (a) the role of gender, OEs, and ADHD in the prediction of domain-specific creativity among Lebanese high-school students attending private schools in Saida; (b) the relationship between OEs and ADHD types in the same sample; and (c) the gender differences in the levels of OEs and ADHD among the students. Students (N=240) from private schools participated in this study. The Conners 3rd Edition Self-Report Scale was used to measure ADHD. The Overexcitability Questionnaire II was used to measure OEs and the Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scales (KDOCS) was used to measure creativity. Hierarchical multiple regression revealed that gender is a notable predictor of artistic creativity in favor of girls and inattention is a notable negative predictor of everyday creativity. It also revealed that the OEs are generally a notable predictor of creativity with intellectual OE being the most notable predictor of everyday, scientific and scholarly creativity and sensual OE being the most notable predictor of performance and artistic creativity. A canonical correlation analysis showed that OEs and ADHD share 47% of the variance and the results are similar by gender. An independent t-test showed that boys and girls did not differ on ADHD subscales. It also showed that girls had higher emotional and sensual OEs while boys had higher psychomotor OEs. The results were discussed in light of the strengths and limitations of this study and recommendations for future research were made.