Some experiments on the paranormal cognition of drawings, with special reference to personality and attitudinal variables

The four studies reported in this dissertation were all investigations of the conditions influencing the occurrence of 'general extrasensory perception* (GESP) between pairs of persons. All studies employed the drawing-reproduction tech¬ nique, in which a person designated as 'agent' concentrates upon a line-drawing depicting some randomly-chosen object, while simultaneously a sensorially-isolated 'percipient' attempts to guess the content of this 'target-drawing' and is required to respond by making a drawing of his or her mental impressions. A single test consisted of ten such picture-guessing trials, three minutes each trial, with no concurrent feedback to the percipient.The drawing-technique is almost a century old, and accordingly a review of the more important milestones in the history of its use is given. This thesis also makes a number of contributions both to the methods for objectively quantifying degree of target-response resemblance, and to the techniques for determining statistical significance.The four experiments collectively enable the drawing of four conclusions: (l) contrary to popular belief, the existence of a close emotional relationship between agent and percipient is neither necessary nor sufficient for the occurrence of GESP; (2) group-performance over the ten-trial ESP-test tends to fluctuate rather unpredictably, although there was some evidence that it conforms to a U-shaped or a linear trend; (3) the scores on an 11-item 'Sheep-Goat Scale' (designed to measure belief in, and experience of, cognitive psi) gave some significantly positive correlations with GESP-scoring, provided that agent and percipient were not in a mutually close relationship with each other; the claim to have experienced at least one instance of telepathy was the most significant predictor of GESP, thus retrospectively providing some validation for the truth of such claims; and (4) th^ Sheep-Goat Scale-scores of the agents were more strongly related to GESP-scoring than were those of the percipients, prompting an analogy with goal-oriented psychokinesis; it is suggested that this phenomenon can be subsumed under a mere general 'goal-accomplishment' principle, called by the author "psychopraxia

Preliminary psychometric data for a Portuguese scale to assess history of depressive symptomatology with a college student sample

We developed a Portuguese questionnaire that could assess history of depressive symptoms. The Depressive History Questionnaire was based on the Depressive Experience Subscale from the Thalbourne Manic-Depressiveness Scale, which was translated into Portuguese. The Depressive History Questionnaire was administered to 459 college students. Female students scored significantly higher than male students. Cronbach alpha was .64 and was considered satisfactory. Principal component analysis revealed that the questionnaire measures only one dimension. Confirmatory factor analysis provided support for the fit of the one-factor model The Depressive History Questionnaire correlates positively and significantly with the Portuguese versions of both the Beck Depression Inventory - II and of the Depressive Personality Disorder Inventory. (Campos et al., 2009 - [email protected]

Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience

Previous research has shown that people reporting contact with aliens, known as “experiencers”, appear to have a different psychological profile compared to control participants. They show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief and experience, and possibly fantasy proneness. They also appear to show greater susceptibility to false memories as assessed using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott technique. The present study reports an attempt to replicate these previous findings as well as assessing tendency to hallucinate and self-reported incidence of sleep paralysis in a sample of 19 UK-based experiencers and a control sample matched on age and gender. Experiencers were found to show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief, paranormal experience, self-reported psychic ability, fantasy proneness, tendency to hallucinate, and self-reported incidence of sleep paralysis. No significant differences were found between the groups in terms of susceptibility to false memories. Implications of the results are discussed and suggestions are made for future avenues of research. Santomauroa, Hamiltona, Rachel Foxa, Thalbourne