Schizotypy—Do Not Worry, It Is Not All Worrisome

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 cognitive framework to explain and integrate their unusual experiences. We conclude that, instead of focusing only on the pathological, future studies should explore the behavioral, genetic, imaging, and psychopharmacological correlates that define the healthy expression of psychotic-like traits. Such studies would inform on protective or compensatory mechanisms of psychosis-risk and could usefully inform us on the evolutionary advantages of the psychosis dimensio

Integration and Development in Schizotypy Research: An Introduction to the Special Supplement

In its fifth decade of existence, the construct of schizotypy is recapturing the early scientific interest it attracted when Paul E. Meehl (1920-2003), who coined the term, pioneered the field of schizotypy research. The International Lemanic Workshop on Schizotypy, hosted at the University of Geneva in December 2013, recently offered an opportunity to address some of the fundamental questions in contemporary schizotypy research and situate the construct in the greater scheme of future scientific projects on schizophrenia and psychological health research. What kind of knowledge has schizotypy research provided in furthering our understanding of schizophrenia? What types of questions can schizotypy research tackle, and which are the conceptual and methodological frameworks to address them? How will schizotypy research contribute to future scientific endeavors? The International Lemanic Workshop brought together leading experts in the field around the tasks of articulating the essential findings in schizotypy research, as well as providing some key insights and guidance to face scientific challenges of the future. The current supplement contains 8 position articles, 4 research articles, and 1 invited commentary that outline the state of the art in schizotypy research toda

Epilogue. From then to now – from now to then: Contemporary research in affective colour psychology might inform research on affective colour meaning in ancient Greek and Roman writings

This chapter provides an overview of how we define and work with colour, what we understand under the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’, and how we approach the study of colour-affect relationships in contemporary societies. Throughout this process, we endeavour to remain attentive to situations that scholars working with ancient texts are likely to encounter in their work

Schizotypal Perceptual Aberrations of Time: Correlation between Score, Behavior and Brain Activity

A fundamental trait of the human self is its continuum experience of space and time. Perceptual aberrations of this spatial and temporal continuity is a major characteristic of schizophrenia spectrum disturbances – including schizophrenia, schizotypal personality disorder and schizotypy. We have previously found the classical Perceptual Aberration Scale (PAS) scores, related to body and space, to be positively correlated with both behavior and temporo-parietal activation in healthy participants performing a task involving self-projection in space. However, not much is known about the relationship between temporal perceptual aberration, behavior and brain activity. To this aim, we composed a temporal Perceptual Aberration Scale (tPAS) similar to the traditional PAS. Testing on 170 participants suggested similar performance for PAS and tPAS. We then correlated tPAS and PAS scores to participants' performance and neural activity in a task of self-projection in time. tPAS scores correlated positively with reaction times across task conditions, as did PAS scores. Evoked potential mapping and electrical neuroimaging showed self-projection in time to recruit a network of brain regions at the left anterior temporal cortex, right temporo-parietal junction, and occipito-temporal cortex, and duration of activation in this network positively correlated with tPAS and PAS scores. These data demonstrate that schizotypal perceptual aberrations of both time and space, as reflected by tPAS and PAS scores, are positively correlated with performance and brain activation during self-projection in time in healthy individuals along the schizophrenia spectrum

Feeling Blue or Seeing Red? Similar Patterns of Emotion Associations With Colour Patches and Colour Terms

For many, colours convey affective meaning. Popular opinion assumes that perception of colour is crucial to influence emotions. However, scientific studies test colour–emotion relationships by presenting colours as patches or terms. When using patches, researchers put great effort into colour presentation. When using terms, researchers have much less control over the colour participants think of. In this between-subjects study, we tested whether emotion associations with colour differ between terms and patches. Participants associated 20 emotion concepts, loading on valence, arousal, and power dimensions, with 12 colours presented as patches (n = 54) or terms (n = 78). We report high similarity in the pattern of associations of specific emotion concepts with terms and patches (r = .82), for all colours except purple (r = .−23). We also observed differences for black, which is associated with more negative emotions and of higher intensity when presented as a term than a patch. Terms and patches differed little in terms of valence, arousal, and power dimensions. Thus, results from studies on colour–emotion relationships using colour terms or patches should be largely comparable. It is possible that emotions are associated with colour concepts rather than particular perceptions or words of colour

Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces after left lateral temporo‐occipital venous infarction: a double dissociation with prosopagnosia

Right hemisphere dominance in face processing is well established and unilateral right inferior temporo‐occipital damage can result in prosopagnosia. Here, we describe a 21‐year‐old right‐handed woman with acute impairment in face recognition that selectively concerned unfamiliar faces, following a focal left lateral temporo‐occipital venous infarct. She was severely impaired in discerning that unknown people seen in everyday life were unfamiliar, although she had no difficulty recognizing familiar people. Thus, she had no prosopagnosia, but abnormal ‘hyperfamiliarity' for unknown faces. Her difficulty was not accompanied by delusions or deficits in discrimination, identification or memory for faces. Standard neuropsychological testing showed that her recognition of familiar faces was entirely normal. By contrast, her sense of personally knowing faces was severely impaired when unknown faces evoked weak signals of familiarity based on spurious cues, to the extent that she would misattribute fame to faces that were unknown but to which she had been incidentally exposed on a prior occasion. Priming experiments also revealed that, unlike normal subjects, she made familiarity judgements without accessing semantic identity representations. Moreover, in face recognition tests, she generally showed bias in that she relied more on right‐hemisphere strategies to identify global traits and less on left‐hemisphere processes compared with healthy subjects. This case provides novel evidence for a differential contribution of the two hemispheres to face recognition. Hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces might arise from an imbalance between reciprocal hemispheric functions in face recognition, with relative hypoactivation of left hemisphere processes but hyperactivation of right‐hemisphere processes for retrieving stored associations about people, linking seen faces to representations of affective and personal relevance. Hence, abnormal bias in attributing some personal meaning to unknown faces could be evoked by spurious signals of familiarity based on irrelevant affective associations in the right hemispher

Mental Imagery for Full and Upper Human Bodies: Common Right Hemisphere Activations and Distinct Extrastriate Activations

The processing of human bodies is important in social life and for the recognition of another person's actions, moods, and intentions. Recent neuroimaging studies on mental imagery of human body parts suggest that the left hemisphere is dominant in body processing. However, studies on mental imagery of full human bodies reported stronger right hemisphere or bilateral activations. Here, we measured functional magnetic resonance imaging during mental imagery of bilateral partial (upper) and full bodies. Results show that, independently of whether a full or upper body is processed, the right hemisphere (temporo-parietal cortex, anterior parietal cortex, premotor cortex, bilateral superior parietal cortex) is mainly involved in mental imagery of full or partial human bodies. However, distinct activations were found in extrastriate cortex for partial bodies (right fusiform face area) and full bodies (left extrastriate body area). We propose that a common brain network, mainly on the right side, is involved in the mental imagery of human bodies, while two distinct brain areas in extrastriate cortex code for mental imagery of full and upper bodie

Loose but Normal: A Semantic Association Study

An abnormal facilitation of the spreading activation within semantic networks is thought to underlie schizophrenics' remote associations and referential ideas. In normal subjects, elevated magical ideation (MI) has also been associated with a style of thinking similar to that of schizotypal subjects. We thus wondered whether normal subjects with a higher MI score would judge "loose associations” as being more closely related than do subjects with a lower MI score. In two experiments, we investigated whether judgments of the semantic distance between stimulus words varied as a function of MI. In the first experiment, random word pairs of two word classes, animals and fruits, were presented. Subjects had to judge the semantic distance between word pairs. In the second experiment, sets of three words were presented, consisting of a pair of indirectly related, or unrelated nouns plus a third noun. Subjects had to judge the semantic distance of the third noun to the word pair. The results of both experiments showed that higher MI subjects considered unrelated words as more closely associated than did lower MI subjects. We conjecture that for normal subjects high on MI "loose associations” may not be loose after all. We also note that the tendency to link uncommon, nonobvious, percepts may not only be the basis of paranormal and paranoid ideas of reference, but also a prerequisite of creative thinkin