Artists report higher levels of aberrant salience—the tendency to attribute unusual significance to stimuli—than both healthy controls and patients with psychosis. In a study of 196 healthy controls, 50 artists from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, and 84 outpatients diagnosed with psychosis, artists scored significantly higher on the Aberrant Salience Inventory. Group membership was the only factor influencing scores; age, gender, education, and antipsychotic treatment did not. The authors suggest that aberrant salience, rather than being solely a marker of pathology, may enhance creative faculties and unique perceptual experiences, and that education might help channel these mechanisms through art.
Aberrant salience (AS) and psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) are linked, and anxiety is common in psychosis-prone individuals and patients. In a study of 163 healthy controls and 44 psychotic patients, AS correlated with more frequent positive PLEs and higher anxiety in both groups. However, the frequency of positive PLEs mediated the relationship between AS and anxiety only among controls, not patients. The authors suggest that in patients, a progressive loss of novelty and insight may impair emotional reactivity to PLEs and the ability to recognize bodily phenomena as anxiety, explaining the difference.