title: A false-positive detection bias as a function of state and trait schizotypy in interaction with intelligence.
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.
authors.affiliation: Personality Psychology and Individual Differences, Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen , Giessen , Germany.
authors.forename: Phillip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Grant
authors.affiliation: Personality Psychology and Individual Differences, Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen , Giessen , Germany.
authors.forename: Mona
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Balser
authors.affiliation: Personality Psychology and Individual Differences, Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen , Giessen , Germany.
authors.forename: Aisha Judith Leila
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Munk
authors.affiliation: Personality Psychology and Individual Differences, Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen , Giessen , Germany.
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Linder
authors.affiliation: Personality Psychology and Individual Differences, Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen , Giessen , Germany.
authors.forename: Juergen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hennig
keywords: intelligence; perception; psychosis continuum; psychosis proneness; schizotypy