Abstract
Schizotypal personality traits correlate with psychopathology and impaired functional outcome. Yet advantageous aspects of positive schizotypy may exist which could promote resilience and creativity, and several studies have identified a high positive but low negative schizotypy group with some signs of adaptation. The aim of our study was to clarify whether such individuals demonstrate only traits associated with well-being, or they also have traits that predict impairment. Participants (N = 643 students, 71.5% female) completed measures of schizotypy, resilience, self-esteem, self-concept clarity, and absorption. We identified four clusters: an overall low schizotypy, an overall high schizotypy, a disorganised-interpersonal schizotypy and a positive schizotypy cluster. The overall high schizotypy cluster seemed to be the most vulnerable as it was the least resilient and showed widespread maladaptation, whereas the high positive schizotypy cluster had intact self-esteem and high resilience and its elevated absorption may hold the promise for adaptive outcomes such as creativity and positive spirituality. However, the high positive schizotypy cluster lacked self-concept clarity. The results suggest that individuals showing high positive and low negative schizotypy demonstrate features promoting mental well-being to an extent that is higher than in all the other clusters, while their self-concept impairment is similar to that observed in the high and the disorganised-interpersonal schizotypy clusters. Better understanding of these factors could be informative for prevention and treatment of psychosis-spectrum disorders.
Highlights
Signs of psychotic and affective psychopathology[36,37], it possesses potential sources of resilience such as elevated openness and extraversion[37], low negative emotionality, and high cooperativeness and selftranscendence[39] and increased sense of c oherence[41]
Enhanced motivational functioning and hedonic capacity in the positive schizotypy group is implicated by findings showing that it has very low levels of negative schizotypy[38], has an increased capability of experiencing anticipatory and consummatory pleasure, and it is characterised by lower suppression and higher expression of emotions[36]
It has been argued that the interaction between resilience and schizotypy is critical in predicting risk for schizophrenia in that individuals with high schizotypy and low resilience are the most v ulnerable[4]
Summary
Signs of psychotic and affective psychopathology[36,37], it possesses potential sources of resilience such as elevated openness and extraversion[37], low negative emotionality, and high cooperativeness and selftranscendence[39] and increased sense of c oherence[41]. Previous studies have shown that positive and negative schizotypy are associated with more negative and less positive valuation of the self, r espectively[27] It remains an open question whether some manifestations of positive schizotypy are linked to increased well-being instead of impaired mental health. Given the specific associations between positive schizotypy and various mental health c omplaints[26,27,28,29], a moderate version seems plausible: this would predict that the positive schizotypy group suffers from subtle psychopathology and shows greater resilience and improved self-esteem, which effectively counter the effects of an incoherent self and contribute to increased quality of life. Considering developmental aspects of s chizotypy[66], and age and sex differences in the prevalence of schizotypal personality disorder and the pattern of comorbid d isorders[67], we evaluate sex and age differences between the groups
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