A large body of research supports the notion that schizotypal personality traits have a positive relationship with anomalous experiences and an inverse relationship with indices of health. More recent dimensional formulations of schizotypy go one step further by suggesting that schizotypal traits and related anomalous experiences may, for some individuals, also have a positive relationship with indices of health. Recent research done within the dimensional framework appears to suggest that clear distinctions exist between “healthy” and “unhealthy” groupings of schizotypal traits and related features.
In the current study it is argued that this trend is problematic in that it ignores any possibility of self-renewal and growth enhancement associated with ostensibly pathogenic anomalous experiences. It was hypothesized that when one attends to spiritual values / beliefs and mystical experience in the context of elevated schizotypal traits and putatively pathogenic anomalous experience, one can find two distinguishable groups, with one group exhibiting nontrivial indications of openness to self-exploration and change. Four hundred one Undergraduates from Miami University were administered the Expressions of Spirituality Inventory (ESI), The Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE), Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), Self Other Scale (SOS), Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R), Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), and Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ). Consistent with the central hypothesis, cluster analysis revealed three high schizotypy groups, with one characterized by unambiguously growth-enhancing anomalous experience (i.e., mystical experience), another characterized by unambiguously pathogenic anomalous experiences (i.e., dissociation and cognitive distortion), and a third characterized by an ambivalent mixture of anomalous experiences (i.e., mystical experience and cognitive distortion). Post-hoc analysis revealed that despite having similar SCL-90-R GSI t-scores, the ambivalent high schizotypy cluster was found to have significantly lower scores on the BHS than the unambiguously pathogenic high schizotypy cluster. The results suggest that spirituality related variables may be a necessary – and symptoms in themselves insufficient – component in determining how “pathogenic” anomalous experiences are evaluated.