True-false scales were devised to measure anhedonia, the lowered ability to experience pleasure. The scales were Physical Anhedonia (40 items) and Social Anhedonia (48 items). After scale development using 371 college students, the final version was given to 505 normal adults stratified by social class, age (18-45), and sex, and to 123 male schizophrenics. The potential artifacts of social desirability, acquiescence, and random responding were ruled out. Coefficient alpha values for Physical Anhedonia and for Social Anhedonia were .74 and .85 for male normal subjects and .82 and .85 for male schizophrenics. The schizophrenics scored more anhedonic than the normal subjects on both Physical and Social Anhedonia. The schizophrenics' scores on Physical Anhedonia appeared to fall into two clusters of scores, one cluster resembling the total distribution of the normal subjects, and a second cluster consisting of scores that were more anhedonic than those of the normal subjects. Anhedonics were more often poor premorbid and hedonics more often good premorbid. The Physical Anhedonia Scale may be useful for testing the hypotheses, advanced by several theorists, that anhedonia is genetically transmitted and that nonpsychotic anhedonics are at high risk for schizophrenia.Anhedonia, the lowered ability to experience pleasure, has been described as a schizophrenic symptom by many psychopathologists, including Kraepelin (1913/1919) and Bleuler (1911/1950, although both Kraepelin and Bleuler viewed the loss of the experience of pleasure as only one facet of the deteriora-

A 28-item true-false scale was constructed to measure schizophrenic body-image aberration. The scale was standardized on both college students and a nonstudent normal control group. Male schizophrenics reported more body-image aberration than nonstudent normal control subjects, but only a portion of the schizophrenics were deviant. Nonpsychotic clinic clients did not have heightened scores. Correlational findings indicated that schizophrenic body-image aberration is an aspect of a broader perceptual aberration. Scores on body-image aberration were negatively correlated with time since first hospitalization. The Body-Image Aberration Scale had essentially no correlation with the Physical Anhedonia Scale of Chapman, Chapman, and Raulin for schizophrenics. For nonschizophrenics, however, high scores on the two scales accompanied one another significantly less often than expected by chance. The authors suggest that the two scales may identify alternative manifestations of proneness toward the same schizophrenia.

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This article reports on the development of a new self-report questionnaire measure of schizotypy - the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale (MSS). Schizotypy offers a useful and unifying construct for understanding schizophrenia-spectrum psychopathology. Questionnaire measures have been widely used to assess schizotypy and have greatly informed our understanding of the construct. However, available measures suffer from a number of limitations, including lack of a clear conceptual framework, outdated wording, unclear factor structure, and psychometric shortcomings. The MSS is based on current conceptual models and taps positive, negative, and disorganized dimensions of schizotypy. The derivation sample included 6265 participants sampled from four universities and Amazon Mechanical Turk. A separate sample of 1000 participants from these sources was used to examine the psychometric properties of the final subscales. Scale development employed classical test theory, item response theory, and differential item function methods. The positive schizotypy and negative schizotypy subscales contain 26 items each, and the disorganized schizotypy subscale contains 25 items. The psychometric properties were almost identical in the derivation and validation samples. All three subscales demonstrated good to excellent reliability, high item-scale correlations, and good item and test curve characteristics. The MSS appears to provide a promising measure for assessing schizotypy.

The present study provided the first examination of the construct validity of the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale (MSS) and the first assessment of its psychometric properties outside of its derivation samples. The MSS contains 77 items that assess positive, negative, and disorganized schizotypy. A large multisite sample of 1,430 participants completed the MSS and measures of schizotypal personality traits and the five-factor model of personality. The MSS subscales had good-to-excellent internal consistency reliability that showed no shrinkage relative to the MSS derivation samples. The psychometric properties and intercorrelations of the MSS subscales were closely consistent with the derivation findings. The MSS Positive Schizotypy subscale had a strong association with cognitive-perceptual schizotypal traits (large effect), positive associations with personality traits of neuroticism and openness to experience, and negative associations with agreeableness. The MSS Negative Schizotypy subscale had a strong association with interpersonal schizotypal traits (medium effect) and negative associations with personality traits of extraversion, openness, and agreeableness. The MSS Disorganized Schizotypy subscale had a strong association with disorganized schizotypal traits (medium effect), a positive association with neuroticism, and a negative association with conscientiousness. The findings were consistent with the a priori predictions and support the construct validity of the MSS. (PsycINFO Database Record