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Methylphenidate undermines or enhances divergent creativity depending on baseline dopamine synthesis capacity

Neuropsychopharmacology volume 48, pages 1849–1858 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Catecholamine-enhancing psychostimulants, such as methylphenidate have long been argued to undermine creative thinking. However, prior evidence for this is weak or contradictory, stemming from studies with small sample sizes that do not consider the well-established large variability in psychostimulant effects across different individuals and task demands. We aimed to definitively establish the link between psychostimulants and creative thinking by measuring effects of methylphenidate in 90 healthy participants on distinct creative tasks that measure convergent and divergent thinking, as a function of individuals’ baseline dopamine synthesis capacity, indexed with 18F-FDOPA PET imaging. In a double-blind, within-subject design, participants were administered methylphenidate, placebo or selective D2 receptor antagonist sulpiride. The results showed that striatal dopamine synthesis capacity and/or methylphenidate administration did not affect divergent and convergent thinking. However, exploratory analysis demonstrated a baseline dopamine-dependent effect of methylphenidate on a measure of response divergence, a creativity measure that measures response variability. Response divergence was reduced by methylphenidate in participants with low dopamine synthesis capacity but enhanced in those with high dopamine synthesis capacity. No evidence of any effect of sulpiride was found. These results show that methylphenidate can undermine certain forms of divergent creativity but only in individuals with low baseline dopamine levels.

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Fig. 1: The effect of MPH on response divergence as a function of dopamine synthesis capacity (Ki) in the putamen.
Fig. 2: The model estimates for predictors, MPH, dopamine synthesis capacity (Ki) and an interaction of MPH and dopamine synthesis capacity for all three (striatal) models on the exploratory response divergence score of the ANT.

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Data availability

All task code is available at https://github.com/zceydas/VICI_Creativity; data is available upon request from the authors.

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Funding

Funding

This work was supported by a Vici grant to R.C. from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO; Grant No. 453-14-015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Ceyda Sayalı

  2. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Ruben van den Bosch, Danae Papadopetraki, Robbert-Jan Verkes & Roshan Cools

  3. Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jessica I Määttä

  4. Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Lieke Hofmans

  5. Department of Psychiatry, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Danae Papadopetraki, Robbert-Jan Verkes & Roshan Cools

  6. Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jan Booij

  7. Department of Medical Imaging, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Jan Booij

  8. Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Matthijs Baas

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CS: data curation, formal analysis, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing, software, visualization; RB: data curation, formal analysis (of the PET data), investigation, software, writing - review & editing. JM: project administration, data curation, investigation, writing - review & editing; LH: investigation, writing - review & editing; DP: investigation, software, writing - review & editing; JB: supervision, writing - review and editing.; R-JV: investigation, writing – review and editing; MB: methodology, writing - review & editing; RC: study conception, study design, overarching supervision of data acquisition, analyses and writing, writing - review & editing.

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Correspondence to Ceyda Sayalı.

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Sayalı, C., van den Bosch, R., Määttä, J.I. et al. Methylphenidate undermines or enhances divergent creativity depending on baseline dopamine synthesis capacity. Neuropsychopharmacol. 48, 1849–1858 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-023-01615-2

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