Another White Christmas: fantasy proneness and reports of 'hallucinatory experiences' in undergraduate students.
In the current experiment, 44 undergraduate students were asked to listen to white noise and instructed to press a button when they believed hearing a recording of Bing Crosby's White Christmas without this record actually being presented. Fourteen participants (32%) pressed the button at least once. These participants had higher scores on fantasy proneness and the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale (LSHS) compared to participants without hallucinatory reports. Both groups did not differ in terms of imagery vividness or sensitivity to social demands. Logistic regression suggested that fantasy proneness is a better predictor of hallucinatory reports than are LSHS scores. This might imply that hallucinatory reports obtained during the White Christmas test reflect a non-specific preference for odd items rather than schizophrenia-like, internal experiences.
Merckelbach
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Department of' Experimental Psychology, Maastricht University, Faculty of Psychology, MD, Netherlands. h.merckelbach@psychology.unimaas.nl
van de Ven
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D000293:Adolescent; D005201:Fantasy; D005260:Female; D006212:Hallucinations / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology; D006693:Holidays; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires