Should the space of basic personality traits be extended to include the disposition toward psychotic-like experiences?
Should the space of basic personality traits be extended to include the disposition toward psychotic-like experiences?

Summary/Abstract: Previous research has shown that there is a latent disposition toward psychotic-like experiences in the general population, labeled schizotypy. However, there is a dispute over the conceptual status of schizotypy: does it represent merely psychosis proneness, or is it a broad and general personality trait? If a disposition should be regarded even as a candidate for a personality trait, its scores would probably be distributed normally in the population and it must show irreducibility in regard to the previously discovered personality traits. In this research, these questions are addressed, using the construct of Disintegration as an operationalization of schizotypy. The results show that although some modalities of Disintegration have skewed distributions in the student sample (N=345, 65% female), the global Disintegration scores have a normal distribution. Furthermore, Disintegration modalities constitute a latent component which is distinct from the personality traits that form HEXACO model of basic personality structure. Nevertheless, Disintegration shares some variance with the HEXACO traits, especially with the negative poles of Extraversion and Conscientiousness. The results suggest that a conceptual view of a schizotypy as a personality trait is at least plausible and they can be used as guidelines for future empirical studies of this problem.

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