The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Director Tom Insel has created a newmethod of researching and conceptualizing mental health dysfunction. Instead of usingheterogeneous symptom classifications, Dr. Insel believes a biological approach tounderstanding dysfunction will lead to more targeted and useful findings. The notion thatidentifying corroborating biological evidence will benefit the disciplines understanding ofmental health disorders is accurate, however, the model of research proposed by Dr. Inselis heavily reliant on biology and ignores important findings in other areas of mental healthresearch. The MMPI-2-RF (Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008/2011) is a well-researched andcomprehensive self-report measure of psychopathology. In lieu of the research constructslisted by the NIMH, we believe the MMPI-2-RF provides a more valid representation ofmental health dysfunction that should be corroborated with biological measures. In thisstudy we evaluated the correlation between measures of thought disorder as described bythe MMPI-2-RF and eye-tracking metrics. Participants were 300 undergraduate studentsfrom a southeastern, rural university. Participants completed the MMPI-2-RF and their eyemovementswere recorded in response to static and full motion video stimuli to investigatethe relationship between visual scanning styles or scanpaths and measures of thoughtdisorder. Bivariate correlations and a series of repeated measures analyses of varianceswere conducted to parse out the relationship between affectively charged video stimuli,thought dysfunction, and scanpath length. Results indicated there was no significantrelationship between elevations on measures of thought dysfunction and scanpath lengthin response to video stimuli. Implications of these results and future directions arediscussed
