Clinical instrument

Dissociation: Absorption

Dissociation: Absorption uses 8 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Dissociation: Absorption.

This is a clinical instrument. It is not publicly self-administered; a clinician assigns it through a secure patient link.

You learn how deeply you tend to become absorbed in experiences.

For anyone who gets so lost in a book, film or daydream that the world falls away.

It comes from dissociation research on absorption, the capacity for deep immersion.

Sample result, example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

What this test is

Welcome. Dissociation: Absorption uses 8 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Dissociation: Absorption.

The measure

It has 8 items, each answered on a 5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate) scale.

International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org).

At a glance

Items

Response scale

5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate)

Est. time

~1 min

Access

Assigned only · no per-report charge

What it measures

Eight statements describe absorption: becoming so involved in a book, film or daydream that one loses track of what is happening around one, finding that time has passed without noticing, and being able to ignore pain or noise when concentrating. Absorption is the most common and least troubling form of dissociative experience.

Tellegen and Atkinson (1974) described absorption as a disposition toward total attention that fully engages one's perceptual and imaginative resources, and related it to hypnotic susceptibility. In dissociation research, absorption forms the everyday end of the continuum measured by the Dissociative Experiences Scale (Bernstein and Putnam, 1986). The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).

The ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe a stronger tendency toward immersive, absorbed experience; lower scores describe attention that stays more anchored in the surroundings. High absorption is often associated with imagination and aesthetic responsiveness and is not in itself a problem.

The scale is used in research on imagination, hypnosis and dissociation. On this site, the Dissociation: Full Scale combines absorption with amnesia and depersonalization, the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES-II) is the standard clinical measure, and the Fantasy scale describes imaginative involvement in fiction.

Validity evidence

Absorption — imaginative involvement and attentional engrossment — is a well-validated component of the broader dissociation construct and predicts hypnotizability and creative engagement.

Example item

“Had the experience of remembering a past event so vividly that it felt like I was reliving that event.”

Very InaccurateModerately InaccurateNeither Accurate nor InaccurateModerately AccurateVery Accurate

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Scoring & interpretation

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.

References

Tellegen, A., & Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences ('absorption'), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83(3), 268-277.
Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory. Personality Psychology in Europe, 7, 7-28.

Sample report preview

The report shows your total score and where it falls across the range of possible scores, followed by a plain-language explanation of what scores in that region describe. Where the instrument has published interpretive bands, the report names the band and what it means. It closes with notes on how to read the result and on when a conversation with a qualified professional may be useful.

Report contents
Section	What it shows
Score	Your scale score, computed with the published scoring key.
Comparisons	How your scores compare with a published comparison group.

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