Premium
Psychoticism: A Study of its Biological Basis in Normal Subjects
Author(s) -
CLARIDGE GORDON S.,
CHAPPA HERBERT J.
Publication year - 1973
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1973.tb00864.x
Subject(s) - psychoticism , neuroticism , psychology , eysenck personality questionnaire , skin conductance , arousal , audiology , personality , clinical psychology , developmental psychology , big five personality traits , extraversion and introversion , social psychology , medicine , biomedical engineering
Starting from the viewpoint that the psychoses represent extreme forms of personality deviation, a study of the psychophysiological correlates of psychoticism in normal subjects was undertaken, using Eysenck's new PEN scale to select three groups of individuals: high P scorers, high N scorers and low N scorers. The research strategy used was to examine, in each of these three groups, the covariation between the two‐flash threshold and skin conductance. This method was derived from previous work showing that what is uniquely different about psychotic patients is that they differ not on any single psychophysiological parameter but in the way in which different measures, including those studied here, covary. A specific comparison was made with a previous study showing that, in normal subjects given LSD‐25, two‐flash threshold and electrodermal level were related in a U‐shaped fashion, compared with the conventional inverted‐U function found in the same subjects under placebo. In the present study a U‐function, similar to that observed under LSD‐25, was evident in high P subjects, this contrasting markedly with the performance found in high N subjects. The difference between high N and high P subjects was particularly obvious in the low range of autonomic arousal, where the groups showed correlations between two‐flash threshold and skin conductance which were significant but opposite in sign. Surprisingly, over this low range, low N subjects closely resembled high P individuals. This latter finding was considered to support the view that, in some people, low reported neuroticism may reflect the emotional blunting associated with certain forms of psychotic personality not measured by the Eysenck P scale, which seems mainly concerned with paranoid characteristics. In general, it was concluded that the results provide evidence for psychoticism as a normal personality dimension having, as its biological basis, a particular kind of nervous typological organization seen, in its extreme form, in the psychotic disorders.