Schizotypal thinking and associative processing: a response commonality analysis of verbal fluency.

OBJECTIVE

To determine whether people with high scores for schizotypal thinking generate more uncommon words in a letter fluency task than people with low scores.

DESIGN

Prospective study.

SETTING

University psychology department.

PATIENTS

Forty healthy, right-handed students.

INTERVENTIONS

Students were administered the Magical Ideation (MI) Scale and a 2-minute letter fluency task in which they named as many nouns as possible beginning with "A" or "F," in any order.

OUTCOME MEASURES

Total number of words produced and percentage of unique, rare and common words (as determined by the responses of the whole group); scores on MI scale.

RESULTS

Participants with high scores (above the median) on the MI scale generated as many words as those who had low scores. People in both groups also generated a comparable number of unique words (named by only 1 person) and common words (named by 6 or more people). As hypothesized, people with high scores on the MI scale generated more rare words (named by fewer than 6 people) than those with low scores.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings support the view of a disinhibition of semantic network functioning as the neuropsychological basis of creative thought, magical ideation and thought disorder.