Dissociation: Full Scale

Thirty-one statements describe the range of dissociative experience, from the ordinary to the unusual. Some describe absorption, becoming so immersed in an activity that one loses track of the surroundings; some describe amnesia, gaps in memory for one's own actions; and some describe depersonalization, feeling detached from oneself or one's surroundings.

Bernstein and Putnam (1986) described dissociation as a continuum running from common absorption to the experiences characteristic of dissociative disorders, and their Dissociative Experiences Scale became the standard measure. The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and cover the same three broad kinds of experience.

The ratings are combined into a single score. Lower scores describe experiences that are infrequent and mostly of the absorptive kind; higher scores describe more frequent dissociation, especially if amnesia and depersonalization contribute. A high score suggests that a careful assessment may be useful and is not a diagnosis.

The scale is used in research on dissociation and trauma. On this site, the three components can be taken separately as Absorption, Amnesia and Depersonalization, the Dissociation: Short Version is a briefer form, and the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES-II) is the standard clinical measure.

The three dissociation domains measured (absorption, depersonalization, amnesia) align with the DES dissociation construct, which shows good convergent validity with trauma history, PTSD severity, and clinical dissociative diagnoses.

“Drove or rode somewhere without remembering later what happened during all or part of the trip.”

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

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.