The claim that favourite colours reveal individuals’ personalities is popular in the media yet lacks scientific support. We assessed this claim in two stages. First, we catalogued claims from six popular websites, and matched them to key... more
The claim that favourite colours reveal individuals’ personalities is popular in the media yet lacks scientific support. We assessed this claim in two stages. First, we catalogued claims from six popular websites, and matched them to key Big Six/HEXACO trait terms, ultimately identifying 11 specific, systematic, testable predictions (e.g., higher Extraversion among those who prefer red, orange, yellow, pink, or turquoise). Next, we tested these predictions in terms of the Big Six personality trait scores and reports of favourite and least favourite colours from 323 French-speaking participants. For every prediction (e.g., red-extraversion), we compared trait scores between participants who chose or did not choose the predicted colour using Welch’s t-tests. We failed to confirm any of the 11 predictions. Further exploratory analyses (MANOVA) revealed no associations between colour preferences and personality trait. Favourite colours appear unrelated to personality, failing to support...
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The colour category PURPLE is strangely heterogeneous, potentially due to the use of different cognates. We asked French speakers from Algeria, France, and Switzerland (n = 274) to produce up to three free associations with violet (basic... more
The colour category PURPLE is strangely heterogeneous, potentially due to the use of different cognates. We asked French speakers from Algeria, France, and Switzerland (n = 274) to produce up to three free associations with violet (basic term), pourpre, and lilas (non-basic terms). We counted 2,075 associations. We developed a coding scheme that i) covers nine major themes, and ii) shows high inter-rater reliability. Overall, the themes colour terms and natural elements and objects were most prominent showing that participants provided closely related associations. Finally, violet triggered more diverse semantic associations than pourpre or lilas. This was true for all countries. It seems that the basic term PURPLE carries more diverse associations and connotations than the non-basic terms.
We quickly form first impressions about newly encountered people guiding our subsequent behaviour (approach, avoidance). Such instant judgments might be innate and automatic, being performed unconsciously and independently to other... more
We quickly form first impressions about newly encountered people guiding our subsequent behaviour (approach, avoidance). Such instant judgments might be innate and automatic, being performed unconsciously and independently to other cognitive processes. Lying detection might be subject to such a modular process. Unfortunately, numerous studies highlighted problems with lying detection paradigms such as high error rates and learning effects. Additionally, humans should be motivated doing both detecting others ’ lies and dis-guising own lies. Disguising own lies might even be more challenging than detecting other people’s lies. Thus, when trying to disguise cheating behaviour, liars might display a mixture of disguising (fake) trust cues and uncontrolled lying cues making the interpretation of the expression difficult (perceivers are guessing). In two consecutive online studies, we tested whether seeing an increasing amount (range 0–4) of lying cues (LC) and non-lying cues (NLC) on a s...
In the present study we introduce a novel task for the quantitative assessment of both originality and speed of individual associations. This ‘BAG ’ (Bridge-the-Associative-Gap) task was used to investigate the relationships between... more
In the present study we introduce a novel task for the quantitative assessment of both originality and speed of individual associations. This ‘BAG ’ (Bridge-the-Associative-Gap) task was used to investigate the relationships between creativity and paranormal belief. Twelve strong ‘believers’ and 12 strong ‘skeptics ’ in paranormal phenomena were selected from a large student population (n> 350). Subjects were asked to produce single-word associations to word pairs. In 40 trials the two stimulus words were semantically indirectly related and in 40 other trials the words were semantically unrelated. Separately for these two stimulus types, response commonalities and association latencies were calculated. The main finding was that for unrelated stimuli, believers produced associations that were more original (had a lower frequency of occurrence in the group as a whole) than those of the skeptics. For the interpretation of the result we propose a model of association behavior that ca...
The link between colour and emotion and its possible similarity across cultures are questions that have not been fully resolved. Online, 711 participants from China, Germany, Greece and the UK associated 12 colour terms with 20 discrete... more
The link between colour and emotion and its possible similarity across cultures are questions that have not been fully resolved. Online, 711 participants from China, Germany, Greece and the UK associated 12 colour terms with 20 discrete emotion terms in their native languages. We propose a machine learning approach to quantify (a) the consistency and specificity of colour–emotion associations and (b) the degree to which they are country-specific, on the basis of the accuracy of a statistical classifier in (a) decoding the colour term evaluated on a given trial from the 20 ratings of colour–emotion association and (b) predicting the country of origin from the 240 individual colour–emotion associations, respectively. The classifier accuracies were significantly above chance level, demonstrating that emotion associations are to some extent colour-specific and that colour–emotion associations are to some extent country-specific. A second measure of country-specificity, the in-group advantage of the colour-decoding accuracy, was detectable but relatively small (6.1%), indicating that colour–emotion associations are both universal and culture-specific. Our results show that machine learning is a promising tool when analysing complex datasets from emotion research.
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The subject of the research is the analysis of associative relations between twenty emotional concepts (interest, amusement, pride, joy, pleasure, satisfaction, admiration, love, relief, compassion, sadness, guilt, sorrow, shame,... more
The subject of the research is the analysis of associative relations between twenty emotional concepts (interest, amusement, pride, joy, pleasure, satisfaction, admiration, love, relief, compassion, sadness, guilt, sorrow, shame, disappointment, fear, disdain, disgust, hatred and anger) and twelve basic names of colurs in the Russian language (red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, blue, violet, brown, pink, grey, black and white). The research is aimed at 1) discovering chromatic and achromatic meanings of emotions; 2)discovering syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between color associations; 3) conduction of a linguocultural expertise of national specifics of discovered associative relations. The research is based on the on-line experiment that involved 103 Russian speakers (63 females and 40 males, the average age of resondents is 36.5, min age is 19 and max age is 78, sd=16.7). To analyze emotions, the researcher has applied the Geneva Emotion Wheel Inventory (GEW version 3....
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As social beings, humans try to control and predict each other’s thoughts and behaviours. Stage magicians are particularly experienced at controlling observers’ perception and reality. Indeed, magicians frequently pretend to read your... more
As social beings, humans try to control and predict each other’s thoughts and behaviours. Stage magicians are particularly experienced at controlling observers’ perception and reality. Indeed, magicians frequently pretend to read your mind or predict your thoughts and behaviour. To understand if, and how observers accept such deceptive information, we reviewed empirical studies that tested the psychological impact of such mind reading demonstrations (mind-over-mind magic). Based on this review, we report on the following major observations. First, observers experience mind reading routines as being of genuine paranormal nature when endorsing such beliefs already ahead of such demonstrations (confirmation bias). Moreover, information on the demonstration will likely be i) dismissed if inconsistent with one’s beliefs, and ii) overridden when the demonstration is of attention- and affect-grabbing potential. Finally, people’s beliefs in what they experienced might increase, but only when beliefs are very close to the actual experience.
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Chronic stress, a characteristic of modern time, has a significant impact on general health. In the context of psychiatric disorders, insufficient coping behavior under chronic stress has been linked to higher rates of (1) depressive... more
Chronic stress, a characteristic of modern time, has a significant impact on general health. In the context of psychiatric disorders, insufficient coping behavior under chronic stress has been linked to higher rates of (1) depressive symptoms among subjects of the general population, (2) relapse among patients under treatment for clinical depression, and (3) negative symptoms among subjects with an elevated vulnerability to psychosis. In this normative study we assessed basic coping behavior among 461 Chinese freshman university students along with their consumption behavior and general health in terms of regular exercises, physical health, psychosomatic disturbances, and mental health. The assessments relied on two instruments that have already demonstrated their capability of (1) reliably detecting insufficient coping behavior under chronic stress and (2) reliably quantifying the interrelation between coping behavior and mental health in the Western world. Thus, we aimed to comple...
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In 2015, a picture of a Dress (henceforth the Dress) triggered popular and scientific interest; some reported seeing the Dress in white and gold (W&G) and others in blue and black (B&B). We aimed to describe the phenomenon and investigate... more
In 2015, a picture of a Dress (henceforth the Dress) triggered popular and scientific interest; some reported seeing the Dress in white and gold (W&G) and others in blue and black (B&B). We aimed to describe the phenomenon and investigate the role of contextualization. Few days after the Dress had appeared on the Internet, we projected it to 240 students on two large screens in the classroom. Participants reported seeing the Dress in B&B (48%), W&G (38%), or blue and brown (B&Br; 7%). Amongst numerous socio-demographic variables, we only observed that W&G viewers were most likely to have always seen the Dress as W&G. In the laboratory, we tested how much contextual information is necessary for the phenomenon to occur. Fifty-seven participants selected colours most precisely matching predominant colours of parts or the full Dress. We presented, in this order, small squares (a), vertical strips (b), and the full Dress (c). We found that (1) B&B, B&Br, and W&G viewers had selected colo...
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Visual backward masking is strongly deteriorated in patients with schizophrenia. Masking deficits are associated with strongly reduced amplitudes of the global field power in the EEG. Healthy participants who scored high in cognitive... more
Visual backward masking is strongly deteriorated in patients with schizophrenia. Masking deficits are associated with strongly reduced amplitudes of the global field power in the EEG. Healthy participants who scored high in cognitive disorganization (a schizotypic trait) were impaired in backward masking compared to participants who scored low. Here, we show that the global field power is also reduced in healthy participants scoring high (n=25) as compared to low (n=20) in cognitive disorganization, though quantitatively less pronounced than in patients (n=10). These results point to similar mechanisms underlying visual backward masking deficits along the schizophrenia spectrum.
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Despite well-established sex differences for cognition, audition, and somatosensation, few studies have investigated whether there are also sex differences in visual perception. We report the results of fifteen perceptual measures (such... more
Despite well-established sex differences for cognition, audition, and somatosensation, few studies have investigated whether there are also sex differences in visual perception. We report the results of fifteen perceptual measures (such as visual acuity, visual backward masking, contrast detection threshold or motion detection) for a cohort of over 800 participants. On six of the fifteen tests, males significantly outperformed females. On no test did females significantly outperform males. Given this heterogeneity of the sex effects, it is unlikely that the sex differences are due to any single mechanism. A practical consequence of the results is that it is important to control for sex in vision research, and that findings of sex differences for cognitive measures using visually based tasks should confirm that their results cannot be explained by baseline sex differences in visual perception.
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When testing risk for psychosis, we regularly rely on self-report questionnaires. Yet, the more that people know about this condition, the more they might respond defensively, in particular with regard to the more salient positive symptom... more
When testing risk for psychosis, we regularly rely on self-report questionnaires. Yet, the more that people know about this condition, the more they might respond defensively, in particular with regard to the more salient positive symptom dimension. In two studies, we investigated whether framing provided by questionnaire instructions might modulate responses on self-reported positive and negative schizotypy. The O-LIFE (UK study) or SPQ (New Zealand study) questionnaire was framed in either a "psychiatric", "creativity", or "personality" (NZ only) context. We tested psychology students (without taught knowledge about psychosis) and medical students (with taught knowledge about psychosis; UK only). We observed framing effects in psychology students in both studies: positive schizotypy scores were lower after the psychiatric compared to the creativity instruction. However, schizotypy scores did not differ between the creativity and personality framing co...
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The latent structure of schizotypy and psychosis-spectrum symptoms remains poorly understood. Furthermore, molecular genetic substrates are poorly defined, largely due to the substantial resources required to collect rich phenotypic data... more
The latent structure of schizotypy and psychosis-spectrum symptoms remains poorly understood. Furthermore, molecular genetic substrates are poorly defined, largely due to the substantial resources required to collect rich phenotypic data across diverse populations. Sample sizes of phenotypic studies are often insufficient for advanced structural equation modeling approaches. In the last 50 years, efforts in both psychiatry and psychological science have moved toward (1) a dimensional model of psychopathology (eg, the current Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology [HiTOP] initiative), (2) an integration of methods and measures across traits and units of analysis (eg, the RDoC initiative), and (3) powerful, impactful study designs maximizing sample size to detect subtle genomic variation relating to complex traits (the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium [PGC]). These movements are important to the future study of the psychosis spectrum, and to resolving heterogeneity with respect to in...
Research Interests: Genetics, Psychology, Psychiatry, Psychosis, Mental Health, and 15 morePsychopathology, Medicine, Intersectoral Collaboration, Humans, Models, Data Sharing, Phenotype, Human Genome, Information Dissemination, Psychotic Disorders, Nosology, Genetic, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Brain Disorders, and Medical and Health Sciences
When traversing through an aperture, such as a doorway, people characteristically deviate towards the right. This rightward deviation can be explained by a rightward attentional bias which leads to rightward bisections in far space. It is... more
When traversing through an aperture, such as a doorway, people characteristically deviate towards the right. This rightward deviation can be explained by a rightward attentional bias which leads to rightward bisections in far space. It is also possible, however, that left or right driving practices affect the deviation. To explore this possibility, Australian (left-side drivers) and Swiss (right-side drivers) participants (n = 36 & 34) walked through the middle of an aperture. To control for the sway of the body, participants started with either their left or right foot. Sway had a significant effect on participants' position in the doorway and the amount of sway was greater for Australians-perhaps due to national differences in gait. There was a significant rightward deviation for the Swiss, but not for the Australians. It is suggested that driving practices have a small additive effect on rightward attentional biases whereby the bias is increased for people who drive on the ri...
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The ability to mentalize has been marked as an important cognitive mechanism enabling belief in supernatural agents. In five studies we cross-culturally investigated the relationship between mentalizing and belief in supernatural agents... more
The ability to mentalize has been marked as an important cognitive mechanism enabling belief in supernatural agents. In five studies we cross-culturally investigated the relationship between mentalizing and belief in supernatural agents with large sample sizes (over 67,000 participants in total) and different operationalizations of mentalizing. The relative importance of mentalizing for endorsing supernatural beliefs was directly compared with credibility enhancing displays-the extent to which people observed credible religious acts during their upbringing. We also compared autistic with neurotypical adolescents. The empathy quotient and the autism-spectrum quotient were not predictive of belief in supernatural agents in all countries (i.e., The Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States), although we did observe a curvilinear effect in the United States. We further observed a strong influence of credibility enhancing displays on belief in supernatural agents. These findings hig...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Gesture, Cognition, and 15 morePsycholinguistics, Metaphor, Medicine, Linear models, Speech, Right Hemisphere Functions, Gestures, Humans, Male, Young Adult, Hand, Reproducibility of Results, Left and Right, Functional Laterality, and Psychomotor Performance
Computerized speech analysis (CSA) is a powerful method that allows one to assess stress-induced mood disturbances and affective disorders through repeated measurements of speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics. Over the past... more
Computerized speech analysis (CSA) is a powerful method that allows one to assess stress-induced mood disturbances and affective disorders through repeated measurements of speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics. Over the past decades CSA has been successfully used in the clinical context to monitor the transition from 'affectively disturbed' to 'normal' among psychiatric patients under treatment. This project, by contrast, aimed to extend the CSA method in such a way that the transition from 'normal' to 'affected' can be detected among subjects of the general population through 10-20 self-assessments. Central to the project was a normative speech study of 5 major languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). Each language comprised 120 subjects stratified according to gender, age, and education with repeated assessments at 14-day intervals (total n = 697). In a first step, we developed a multivariate model to assess affective s...
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Humans like some colours and dislike others, but which particular colours and why remains to be understood. Empirical studies on colour preferences generally targeted most preferred colours, but rarely least preferred (disliked) colours.... more
Humans like some colours and dislike others, but which particular colours and why remains to be understood. Empirical studies on colour preferences generally targeted most preferred colours, but rarely least preferred (disliked) colours. In addition, findings are often based on general colour preferences leaving open the question whether results generalise to specific objects. Here, 88 participants selected the colours they preferred most and least for three context conditions (general, interior walls, t-shirt) using a high-precision colour picker. Participants also indicated whether they associated their colour choice to a valenced object or concept. The chosen colours varied widely between individuals and contexts and so did the reasons for their choices. Consistent patterns also emerged, as most preferred colours in general were more chromatic, while for walls they were lighter and for t-shirts they were darker and less chromatic compared to least preferred colours. This meant th...
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Autism and schizophrenia spectra were long considered distinct entities. Yet, recent studies emphasized overlapping clinical and personality features suggesting common mechanisms and liabilities. Independent notions, however, highlight... more
Autism and schizophrenia spectra were long considered distinct entities. Yet, recent studies emphasized overlapping clinical and personality features suggesting common mechanisms and liabilities. Independent notions, however, highlight that the two spectra oppose each other socially (positive schizotypal hyper-mentalism versus autistic hypo-mentalism). To clarify these relationships, we used data from 921 French-speaking Swiss undergraduates to firstly validate the French Autism Spectrum Questionnaire (AQ) identifying an optimal factor structure. Secondly, we assessed relationships between this AQ structure and schizotypic personality traits. Results from correlational and principal component analyses replicated both overlapping and opposing relationships. We conjecture that autistic traits opposing positive schizotypy represent autistic mentalizing deficits. We discuss implications of our findings relative to theories of autism and schizophrenia spectrum relationships.
Research Interests: Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Autism, Personality, Schizophrenia, and 15 moreLanguage, Adolescent, Medicine, France, Schizotypy, Students, Humans, Female, Male, Big Five Personality Traits, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Clinical Sciences, Schizotypal Personality Disorder, Adult, and Reproducibility of Results
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Endophenotypes are of crucial interest for schizophrenia research linking genetic abnormalities to pathology. During the last NCCR period, we have characterized one endophenotype, based on visual backward masking (VBM) deficits,... more
Endophenotypes are of crucial interest for schizophrenia research linking genetic abnormalities to pathology. During the last NCCR period, we have characterized one endophenotype, based on visual backward masking (VBM) deficits, behaviourally, electrophysiologically and genetically. We found strongly reduced global field power (GFP) amplitudes to masked stimuli in schizophrenic patients (Plomp et al., 2013) and in 22q11 patients (Coop. Rihs & Eliez, ongoing). Here, we show that also healthy students with high scores of cognitive disorganization show masking deficits and reduced GFP but at a lesser extent as patients (Cappe et al., 2012; Favrod et al., in prep.; Coop. Draganski, Mohr, ongoing). Nicotinic cholinergic dysfunction has been proposed to be a key mechanism in schizophrenia (Bakanidze et al., 2013). Smoking can be seen as a compensatory mechanism to counteract these dysfunctions. Based on this hypothesis, we investigated the effect of nicotine on VBM in students with high scores of schizotypy (Shaqiri et al., in revision). However, we did not find any effect of nicotine on VBM performance.
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Spatial perspective-taking that involves imagined changes in one's spatial orientation is facilitated by vestibular stimulation inducing a congruent sensation of self-motion. We examined further the role of vestibular resources in... more
Spatial perspective-taking that involves imagined changes in one's spatial orientation is facilitated by vestibular stimulation inducing a congruent sensation of self-motion. We examined further the role of vestibular resources in perspective-taking by evaluating whether aberrant and conflicting vestibular stimulation impaired perspective-taking performance. Participants (N = 39) undertook either an "own body transformation" (OBT) task, requiring speeded spatial judgments made from the perspective of a schematic figure, or a control task requiring reconfiguration of spatial mappings from one's own visuo-spatial perspective. These tasks were performed both without and with vestibular stimulation by whole-body Coriolis motion, according to a repeated measures design, balanced for order. Vestibular stimulation was found to impair performance during the first minute post stimulus relative to the stationary condition. This disruption was task-specific, affecting only th...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognition, Embodied Cognition, and 14 moreMotion perception, Imagination, Medicine, Vestibular System, Space perception, Humans, Judgment, Sensation, Psychological, Orientation, Male, Adult, Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation, and Psychomotor Performance
Behavioural and cerebral lateralization are thought to be controlled, at least in part, by prenatal testosterone (T) levels, explaining why sex differences are found in both laterality traits. The present study investigated hormonal... more
Behavioural and cerebral lateralization are thought to be controlled, at least in part, by prenatal testosterone (T) levels, explaining why sex differences are found in both laterality traits. The present study investigated hormonal effects on laterality using adult salivary T levels, to explore the adequacy of competing theories: the Geschwind, Behan and Galaburda, the callosal, and the sexual differentiation hypotheses. Sixty participants (15 right-handers and 15 left-handers of each sex) participated. Behavioural lateralization was studied by means of hand preference tests (i.e., the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory and the Quantification of Hand Preference test) and a hand skill test (i.e., the Peg-Moving test) whereas cerebral lateralization for language was studied using the Consonant-Vowel Dichotic Listening test and the Visual Half-Field Lexical Decision test. Salivary T and cortisol (C) concentrations were measured by luminescence immunoassay. Canonical correlations did not reveal significant relationships between T levels and measures of hand preference, hand skill, or language laterality. Thus, our findings add to the growing literature showing no relationship between T concentrations with behavioural or cerebral lateralization. It is claimed that prenatal T is not a major determinant of individual variability in either behavioural or cerebral lateralization.
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Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Physics, Decision Making, Cognition, Behavior, and 15 moreFace, Adolescent, Medicine, Multidisciplinary, Deception, Humans, Female, Male, Cheating, Lie detection, PLoS one, Aged, Middle Aged, Adult, and Lying
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The question of how to quantify insufficient coping behavior under chronic stress is of major clinical relevance. In fact, chronic stress increasingly dominates modern work conditions and can affect nearly every system of the human body,... more
The question of how to quantify insufficient coping behavior under chronic stress is of major clinical relevance. In fact, chronic stress increasingly dominates modern work conditions and can affect nearly every system of the human body, as suggested by physical, cognitive, affective and behavioral symptoms. Since freshmen students experience constantly high levels of stress due to tight schedules and frequent examinations, we carried out a 3-center study of 1,303 students from Italy, Spain and Argentina in order to develop socioculturally independent means for quantifying coping behavior. The data analysis relied on 2 self-report questionnaires: the Coping Strategies Inventory (COPE) for the assessment of coping behavior and the Zurich Health Questionnaire which assesses consumption behavior and general health dimensions. A neural network approach was used to determine the structural properties inherent in the COPE instrument. Our analyses revealed 2 highly stable, socioculturally ...
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Cognition, Martial Arts, Motor Control, Laterality, and 15 moreAdolescent, Medicine, Humans, Male, Neuronal Plasticity, Dichotic Listening, Athletes, Adult, Hemispheric Specialization, Neuropsychologia, Neurosciences, Control Group, Motor Skills, Functional Laterality, and Neuropsychological Tests
The major features in eating disorders are a preoccupation with food and its consumption and body dissatisfaction. Diagnostic manuals provide clusters of criteria according to which affected individuals can be categorized into one or... more
The major features in eating disorders are a preoccupation with food and its consumption and body dissatisfaction. Diagnostic manuals provide clusters of criteria according to which affected individuals can be categorized into one or other group of eating disorder. Yet, when considering the high proportion of comorbidities and ignoring the content of the symptoms (food, body), the major features seem to yield obsessional-compulsive, addictive, and impulsive qualities. In the present article, we review studies from the neuroscientific literature (mainly lesion studies) on eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, impulse control disorder, and addiction to investigate the possibility of a wider phenotype that can be related to a common brain network. The literature localizes this network to the right frontal lobe and its connectivities. This network, when dysfunctional, might result in a behavior that favors the preoccupation with particular thoughts, behaviors, anxieties, and u...
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Gestures are the first forms of conventional communication that young children develop in order to intentionally convey a specific message. However, at first, infants rarely communicate successfully with their gestures, prompting... more
Gestures are the first forms of conventional communication that young children develop in order to intentionally convey a specific message. However, at first, infants rarely communicate successfully with their gestures, prompting caregivers to interpret them. Although the role of caregivers in early communication development has been examined, little is known about how caregivers attribute a specific communicative function to infants' gestures. In this study, we argue that caregivers rely on the knowledge about the referent that is shared with infants in order to interpret what communicative function infants wish to convey with their gestures. We videotaped interactions from six caregiver-infant dyads playing with toys when infants were 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 months old. We coded infants' gesture production and we determined whether caregivers interpreted those gestures as conveying a clear communicative function or not; we also coded whether infants used objects according to...
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A long-standing tradition in personality research in psychology, and nowadays increasingly in psychiatry, is that psychotic and psychotic-like thoughts are considered common experiences in the general population. Given their widespread... more
A long-standing tradition in personality research in psychology, and nowadays increasingly in psychiatry, is that psychotic and psychotic-like thoughts are considered common experiences in the general population. Given their widespread occurrence, such experiences cannot merely reflect pathological functioning. Moreover, reflecting the multi-dimensionality of schizotypy, some dimensions might be informative for healthy functioning while others less so. Here, we explored these possibilities by reviewing research that links schizotypy to favorable functioning such as subjective wellbeing, cognitive functioning (major focus on creativity), and personality correlates. This research highlights the existence of healthy people with psychotic-like traits who mainly experience positive schizotypy (but also affective features mapping onto bipolar disorder). These individuals seem to benefit from a healthy way to organize their thoughts and experiences, that is, they employ an adaptive cogniti...
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Schizotypy refers to a set of personality traits thought to reflect the subclinical expression of the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia. Here, we review the cognitive and brain functional profile associated with high questionnaire... more
Schizotypy refers to a set of personality traits thought to reflect the subclinical expression of the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia. Here, we review the cognitive and brain functional profile associated with high questionnaire scores in schizotypy. We discuss empirical evidence from the domains of perception, attention, memory, imagery and representation, language, and motor control. Perceptual deficits occur early and across various modalities. While the neural mechanisms underlying visual impairments may be linked to magnocellular dysfunction, further effects may be seen downstream in higher cognitive functions. Cognitive deficits are observed in inhibitory control, selective and sustained attention, incidental learning, and memory. In concordance with the cognitive nature of many of the aberrations of schizotypy, higher levels of schizotypy are associated with enhanced vividness and better performance on tasks of mental rotation. Language deficits seem most pronounced in hi...
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Magical ideation and belief in the paranormal is considered to represent a trait-like character; people either believe in it or not. Yet, anecdotes indicate that exposure to an anomalous event can turn skeptics into believers. This... more
Magical ideation and belief in the paranormal is considered to represent a trait-like character; people either believe in it or not. Yet, anecdotes indicate that exposure to an anomalous event can turn skeptics into believers. This transformation is likely to be accompanied by altered cognitive functioning such as impaired judgments of event likelihood. Here, we investigated whether the exposure to an anomalous event changes individuals' explicit traditional (religious) and non-traditional (e.g., paranormal) beliefs as well as cognitive biases that have previously been associated with non-traditional beliefs, e.g., repetition avoidance when producing random numbers in a mental dice task. In a classroom, 91 students saw a magic demonstration after their psychology lecture. Before the demonstration, half of the students were told that the performance was done respectively by a conjuror (magician group) or a psychic (psychic group). The instruction influenced participants' expl...
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Schizotypy refers to a constellation of personality traits that are believed to mirror the subclinical expression of schizophrenia in the general population. Evidence from pharmacological studies indicates that dopamine (DA) is involved... more
Schizotypy refers to a constellation of personality traits that are believed to mirror the subclinical expression of schizophrenia in the general population. Evidence from pharmacological studies indicates that dopamine (DA) is involved in the etiology of schizophrenia. Based on the assumption of a continuum between schizophrenia and schizotypy, researchers have begun investigating the association between DA and schizotypy using a wide range of methods. In this article, we review published studies on this association from the following areas of work: (1) experimental investigations of the interactive effects of dopaminergic challenges and schizotypy on cognition, motor control, and behavior (2), dopaminergically supported cognitive functions (3), studies of associations between schizotypy and polymorphisms in genes involved in dopaminergic neurotransmission, and (4) molecular imaging studies of the association between schizotypy and markers of the DA system. Together, data from thes...
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We tested levodopa effects on lateralized direct and indirect semantic priming in 40 healthy right-handed men in a placebo-controlled, double-blind procedure. Crucially, priming was also analyzed as a function of participants'... more
We tested levodopa effects on lateralized direct and indirect semantic priming in 40 healthy right-handed men in a placebo-controlled, double-blind procedure. Crucially, priming was also analyzed as a function of participants' positive schizotypal features (magical ideation, MI), previously found to be associated with an enhanced semantic spreading activation (SSA) within the right hemisphere. Across both priming conditions, we observed increased semantic priming in the levodopa group 1) specifically after right visual field stimulations and 2) in high MI scorers. In both instances, increased semantic priming emerged from exceedingly long reaction times to unrelated targets reflecting 1) the left hemisphere's specialization for closely related concepts and 2) an opposite association between MI and SSA in the levodopa as compared with the placebo group. As a final finding, low MI scorers under levodopa performed like high MI scorers under placebo. Our findings speak against a...
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Defensive responding in schizotypy questionnaires might depend on context. Students completed a schizotypy questionnaire in a "psychiatric" context or a "creativity" context. Positive, but not negative, schizotypy... more
Defensive responding in schizotypy questionnaires might depend on context. Students completed a schizotypy questionnaire in a "psychiatric" context or a "creativity" context. Positive, but not negative, schizotypy scores were lower in the psychiatry than in the creativity group, but findings applied mainly to male participants. The implications of these findings are critically discussed.