Testing the Claim That ADHD Confers a Creativity Advantage

What the research found

“ADHD comes with creativity.” The claim turns up in parenting books and in most of the forums parents find in the week after a diagnosis. It is almost never accompanied by a source.

Sixty-six children aged seven to twelve sat the figural form of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, thirty minutes of drawing scored for four separate qualities. Thirty-three had been diagnosed with ADHD by a child psychiatrist at Imam Hossein Hospital in Tehran, met the DSM-IV criteria, and carried no second diagnosis on a structured clinical interview called the K-SADS. The other thirty-three came from schools in the same region, matched for age and sex, and screened clear on that interview. Banafsheh Aliabadi and three colleagues at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences reported the comparison in the Iranian Journal of Psychiatry in 2016.

The test asks a child to build a picture from a bean-shaped scrap of paper, then from ten unfinished line drawings, then from a page of circles. Four scores come out of it. Fluency is the number of meaningful ideas produced, and flexibility is the number of different categories those ideas fall into. Originality rates how rare an idea is against the rest of the sample, and elaboration rewards detail. What the instrument captures is divergent thinking under a clock, meaning the rate and range of ideas a child can generate on demand, which is a narrower thing than the word creativity carries in ordinary use.

Total creativity was 125.2 for the children with ADHD and 130.6 for the controls, a gap the analysis could not separate from chance. Intelligence, screened with the Raven test, was similarly close at 106 and 110. Every child in the study scored above 90 on that screen, so neither group carried the low scorers who might have dragged one side down.

On two of the four subscales the groups did diverge, and both times in favour of the children without ADHD. Fluency was 18.1 against 20.1, and flexibility 14.3 against 16.9, each difference reaching statistical significance. Originality and elaboration were nearly identical, 27.5 against 28.1 and 65.2 against 65.5.

No effect sizes are reported, so how large those two differences were cannot be stated, and no correction was applied for testing four scores at once. The direction is what survives. Where the groups differed at all, the children without ADHD produced more ideas and more varied ones.

What it means for you and your child

The popular claim did not arrive from nowhere. Earlier work did find higher creativity scores among children with ADHD, and the Tehran authors take those studies apart one at a time. In one, six of the eleven children who scored above the ninetieth percentile had also been selected for a gifted scholars programme. In another, gifted students with ADHD outperformed their peers on creative tasks, but the sample was drawn from a camp for gifted students and the ADHD was established by self-report rather than by a clinician. Where the positive finding is strongest, giftedness sits in the sample beside the diagnosis, and no one has managed to pull the two apart.

Fluency and flexibility, the two scores that moved here, are counts. They reward a child who can generate many ideas across many categories inside half an hour, in a room, with an examiner waiting. Neither score reaches the thing most parents mean by creativity: the strange idea that arrives once and gets pursued for a year.

Its children came from a psychiatric clinic rather than from the community, and clinic-referred samples run more impaired than the wider population of children with ADHD. Severity and subtype went unrecorded. The children with ADHD took the drawing test without stimulant medication, a choice the authors defend and also flag, since being unmedicated may have cost them attention and motivation for finishing the tasks. Any such cost would land first on fluency, which is a count of what got completed.

Sixty-six children in one Tehran clinic cannot settle a question of this size, and the authors do not pretend otherwise; their stated conclusion is that creativity in the ADHD group was no different from the controls, and worse in some areas. Set beside the studies that came before, the honest position is that the field does not know whether ADHD confers any advantage in inventiveness, and that its best evidence for one came from samples thick with gifted children.

That leaves less to argue with at a school meeting and rather more room at home. Whether your child is inventive is a question their own work answers.