Guide
Psychosis-proneness scales
Loren and Jean Chapman and their colleagues built a family of true-false questionnaires to study schizotypy, a set of traits that relates to risk for psychosis. Implicitify carries five of them. They are research and screening tools, not diagnostic tests.
The scales
- Perceptual Aberration Scale (PAS). Unusual experiences of one's body and of perception.
- Magical Ideation Scale (MIS). Belief in forms of causation that ordinary experience would call invalid.
- Revised Social Anhedonia Scale (R-SAS). Low interest in and pleasure from social contact.
- Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS). Lasting traits of high energy, sociability and elevated mood.
- Impulsive-Nonconformity Scale (INS). Impulsive, nonconforming and antisocial behavior.
Where the scales come from
Chapman, Chapman and Raulin introduced the Perceptual Aberration Scale in 1978 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Eckblad and Chapman published the Magical Ideation Scale in 1983 in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and the Hypomanic Personality Scale in 1986 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Chapman and colleagues described the 51-item Impulsive Nonconformity Scale in 1984 in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. The Revised Social Anhedonia Scale updates the social anhedonia scale that Chapman, Chapman and Raulin first published in 1976.
What the follow-up research found
Chapman and colleagues followed 508 people for ten years and reported the results in 1994 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. People with high scores on the Perceptual Aberration Scale, the Magical Ideation Scale or both differed from the comparison group at follow-up. They had more psychotic disorders, more psychotic-like experiences, more schizotypal symptoms and more relatives with psychosis. High Magical Ideation scores combined with above-average Social Anhedonia scores marked an especially deviant group. In the same study, the Impulsive Nonconformity Scale did not predict psychosis proneness.
The authors stressed that calling a group psychosis prone does not mean that every member will become psychotic. A high score describes a pattern of traits. It does not predict the course of any one person.
How Implicitify scores them
Each scale is scored by its published true-false key and reported on its own. The report shows the raw score and, where published comparison data exist, a z-score and a percentile. Clinicians and researchers can send any of the scales by secure link.
Scores and reports describe responses. They are not a diagnosis.