Schizotypy refers to the personality trait of experiencing "psychotic" symptoms and can be regarded as a predisposition of schizophrenia-spectrum psychopathology (Raine, 1991). Cumulative evidence has revealed that individuals with schizotypy, as well as schizophrenia patients, have emotional processing deficits. In the present study, we investigated multimodal emotion perception in schizotypy ...

According to various diathesis-stress models of schizophrenia, life stress plays a defining role in the onset and course of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. In this regard, individual differences in coping strategies and affective traits, variables related to the management and experience of stress, may play a large role in susceptibility to the disorder and symptom exacerbation. Furthermore, ...

We examined neurocognitive correlates of three dimensions of schizotypy in 63 healthy first degree relatives of schizophrenia patients. Neurocognitive measures of attention, verbal memory, and prefrontal functioning were combined with self-report and interview measures of schizotypy. State-psychopathology (anxiety and depression) was a strong predictor for positive schizotypy (PS) and negative ...

Clinical and phenomenological accounts of schizophrenia suggest that impairments in self-reflective processes significantly contribute to psychopathological expression. Recent imaging studies observe atypical cerebral activation patterns during self-reflection, especially around the cortical midline structures, both in psychosis-prone adults and individuals with schizophrenia. Given that self-r...

Previous research has shown a unique effect of red light on visual processing related to both schizophrenia and positive schizotypy. The current study examined whether this effect is influenced by sex in a more broadly-defined schizotypy sample. A location backward masking (BM) task with red, green, and gray backgrounds was administered to 34 undergraduate students (59% female) with a high scor...

Schizotypy, defined in terms of commonly occurring personality traits related to the schizophrenia spectrum, has been an important construct for understanding the neurodevelopment and stress-diathesis of schizophrenia. However, as schizotypy nears its sixth decade of application, it is important to acknowledge its impressively rich literature accumulating outside of schizophrenia research. In t...

Adopting a dimensional approach to experimental psychopathology, and taking into account inconsistencies in the previous literature, we examined whether reports of psychotic-like experiences in undergraduate students were associated with shift-learning deficits, akin to those seen in schizophrenia. The participants (N=72) were tested on a new compound stimulus discrimination task before and aft...

OBJECTIVE The present study introduced a novel word-detection paradigm to examine detection biases as a function of different schizotypy dimensions in a sample of undergraduate students. METHOD The participants (N = 80) were asked to detect fast moving (8 frames/second) words among simultaneously moving non-words. RESULTS Positive schizotypy was associated with a tendency to report words th...

Schizophrenia is a common psychiatric diagnosis affecting approximately 0.7% of the population worldwide (1). Cognitive symptoms in schizophrenia, such as impaired memory, poor attention/information processing, and difficulties with executive functions, are a core feature of schizophrenia and strongly related to quality of life and functional outcomes, yet generally respond poorly to current tr...

This study investigated the factor structure and etiology of four self-report schizotypy questionnaires during young adulthood (age 18-27) in 98 monozygotic and 59 same-sex dizygotic twin pairs from the community. A single phenotypic factor was identified that was primarily associated with Perceptual Aberration, Magical Ideation, and the Rust Inventory of Schizotypal Cognitions scales, and less...