Childhood Adversity and the Creative Experience in Adult Professional Performing Artists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Childhood adversity is identified as any exposure to abuse, neglect or family dysfunction. Greater exposure to childhood adversity has been strongly identified with increased morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study was to examine differences in creative experiences, fantasy proneness, dispositional flow, exposure to adult traumatic events, and psychopathology (internalized shame, trait anxiety), amongst professional performing artists who experienced no childhood adversity, some adversity, or substantial adversity. This cross-section IRB approved study examined 234 professional performers (dancers, opera singers, actors, directors, musicians). Self-report measurements were included to examine the following psychological factors: adverse childhood experiences (ACE), experience of creativity questionnaire, dispositional flow, trait anxiety, internalized shame, fantasy, and total adult and childhood traumatic events. The sample was divided into three groups based on ACE scores: 0 ACE (n = 93), 1 – 3 ACEs (n = 95), ≥ 4 ACEs (n = 42). The MANCOVA (with age and gender as covariates) results revealed no significant (p = .280) differences between all three ACE groups for the nine flow scales (optimal performance measurements). Performing artists with ≥ 4 ACEs had significantly stronger creative experiences (p = .006) related to distinct creative processing, absorption, and a transformational sense of self and the world. They were also more fantasy prone, shame-based, anxious, and experienced more cumulative past traumatic events (p < .001). Although the high ACE group experienced greater negative effects, they also endorsed positive creative performance experiences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".