Abstract
Hallucinatory experiences are by far not limited to patients with clinical psychosis. A number of internal and external factors may bring about such experiences in healthy individuals, whereby the personality trait of (positive) schizotypy is a major mediator of individual differences. Psychotic experiences are defined as associating abnormal meaning to real but objectively irrelevant perceptions. Especially, the ambiguity of a stimulus correlates positively with the likelihood of abnormal interpretation, and intelligence is believed to have an important influence and act as protective against clinical psychosis in highly schizotypic individuals. In this study, we presented 131 healthy participants with 216 15-letter strings containing either a word, a non-word, or only random letters and asked them to report, whether or not they believed to have seen a word. The aim was to replicate findings that participants with high values in positive schizotypy on the trait-level make more false-positive errors and assess the role of stimulus-ambiguity and verbal intelligence. Additionally, we wanted to examine whether the same effect could be shown for indices of state schizotypy. Our results support findings that both state and trait positive schizotypy explain significant variance in “seeing things that are not there” and that the properties of individual stimuli have additional strong effects on the false-positive hit rates. Finally, we found that verbal intelligence and positive schizotypy interact with stimulus-ambiguity in the production of false-positive perceptions.
Highlights
Hallucinatory experiences, especially of an auditory nature, are sometimes erroneously believed to exist only as symptoms of psychosis and, by extension, schizophrenia
We found a significant effect of unusual experiences (UnEx) on the false-positive detection rate [F 2, 127 = 3.01; p = 0.027], whereby Bonferroni-corrected post hoc test showed that this effect was mainly explained by the highest scores in the high schizotypy group compared to the low schizotypy group [p = 0.032]
We found a significant effect of positive schizotypy on the falsepositive detection rate, whereby especially highly schizotypic participants had more incidences of “seeing words that were not there” than low schizotypic individuals
Summary
Hallucinatory experiences, especially of an auditory nature, are sometimes erroneously believed to exist only as symptoms of psychosis and, by extension, schizophrenia. A number of clinical and non-clinical factors exist that bring on individual hallucinatory experiences in non-psychotic patients [e.g., stress, caffeine, and the interaction of both; [2]], it has been repeatedly shown that the occurrence of such experiences is mediated by personality traits related to schizotypy [e.g., Ref. The authors clearly argue that individual differences in dopaminergic (dys)regulation in the healthy population exist. These differences explain both the appearance of hallucinations in non-psychotic individuals, as well as a possible biological basis of the aforementioned personality trait of schizotypy/psychosis-proneness
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