The neurocognitive processes underlying the formation and maintenance of paranormal beliefs are important for understanding schizotypal ideation. Behavioral studies indicated that both schizotypal and paranormal ideation are based on an overreliance on the right hemisphere, whose coarse rather than focussed semantic processing may favor the emergence of 'loose' and 'uncommon' associations. To e...

Previous studies have shown that one's prior beliefs have a strong effect on perceptual decision-making and attentional processing. The present study extends these findings by investigating how individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are related to perceptual and attentional biases. Two field studies were conducted in which visitors of a paranormal conducted a perceptual dec...

Often it is difficult to find a natural explanation as to why a surprising coincidence occurs. In attempting to find one, people may be inclined to accept paranormal explanations. The objective of this study was to investigate whether people with a lower threshold for being surprised by coincidences have a greater propensity to become believers compared to those with a higher threshold. Partici...

This study investigated the relationship between reported out-of-body experiences, certain psychological variables and personality characteristics. One hundred and sixtyseven participants completed a series of questionnaires to investigate differences amongst those participants reporting out-of-body experiences and those who were classified as believers or non-believers on: fantasy proneness, p...

The present investigation tested the hypothesis that, as an aspect of schizotypal thinking, the formation of paranormal beliefs was related to spreading activation characteristics within semantic networks. From a larger student population (n = 117) prescreened for paranormal belief, 12 strong believers and 12 strong disbelievers (all women) were invited for a lateralized semantic priming task w...

Let D be a digraph, V (D) and A(D) will denote the sets of vertices and arcs of D, respectively. A (k, l)-kernel N of D is a k-independent (if u, v ∈ N then d(u, v), d(v, u) ≥ k) and l-absorbent (if u ∈ V (D) − N then there exists v ∈ N such that d(u, v) ≤ l) set of vertices. A k-kernel is a (k, k − 1)-kernel. A digraph D is transitive if (u, v), (v, w) ∈ A(D) implies that (u,w) ∈ A(D). This co...

Psychological change is difficult to assess, in part because self-reported beliefs and attitudes may be biased or distorted. The present study probed belief change, in an educational context, by using the hindsight bias to counter another bias that generally plagues assessment of subjective change. Although research has indicated that skepticism courses reduce paranormal beliefs, those findings...

Near-death experiences, profound subjective events experienced on the threshold of death, have been extensively studied over the past decade. These near-death experiences (NDEs) often include events with apparently paranormal features. In one study (Greyson & Stevenson, 1980), 75% of subjects reported out-of-body experiences, 49% reported an apparitional experience, 39% reported apparent extras...

This paper considers two main questions: (1) What is the relationship between paranormal experience and transpersonal experience? (2) What is the relationship between transpersonal psychology and parapsychology? I look at examples of experiences that may be considered both paranormal and transpersonal and at how these two realms of experience have been associated throughout history and across c...