Apophenia as the disposition to false positives: A unifying framework for openness and psychoticism.

Abstract

Positive symptoms of schizophrenia and its extended phenotype—often termed psychoticism or positive schizotypy—are characterized by the inclusion of novel, erroneous mental contents. One promising framework for explaining positive symptoms involves apophenia, conceptualized here as a disposition toward false-positive errors. Apophenia and positive symptoms have shown relations to openness to experience (more specifically, to the openness aspect of the broader openness/intellect domain), and all of these constructs involve tendencies toward pattern seeking. Nonetheless, few studies have investigated the relations between psychoticism and non–self-report indicators of apophenia, let alone the role of normal personality variation. The current research used structural equation models to test associations between psychoticism, openness, intelligence, and non–self-report indicators of apophenia comprising false-positive error rates on a variety of computerized tasks. In Sample 1, 1,193 participants completed digit identification, theory of mind, and emotion recognition tasks. In Sample 2, 195 participants completed auditory signal detection and semantic word association tasks. Psychoticism and the openness aspect were positively correlated. Self-reported psychoticism, openness, and their shared variance were positively associated with apophenia, as indexed by false-positive error rates, whether or not intelligence was controlled for. Apophenia was not associated with other personality traits, and openness and psychoticism were not associated with false-negative errors. Findings provide insights into the measurement of apophenia and its relation to personality and psychopathology. Apophenia and pattern seeking may be promising constructs for unifying the openness aspect of personality with the psychosis spectrum and for providing an explanation of positive symptoms. Results are discussed in the context of possible adaptive characteristics of apophenia as well as potential risk factors for the development of psychotic disorders.

Aberrant Salience Across Levels of Processing in Positive and Negative Schizotypy

“…Additionally, positive schizotypy was associated with the self-reported tendency to experience coincidences in one’s life as meaningful (Rominger et al, 2018). Another study found that positive schizotypy was associated with false positives on a semantic association task, such that participants high in positive traits were more likely to label unrelated item pairs as related (Blain et al, 2019). Experience sampling studies have captured subjective reports of altered experience of salience in real-world settings.…”

Activation of the Default Network During a Theory of Mind Task Predicts Individual Differences in Agreeableness and Social Cognitive Ability

“…Each of the Big Five traits can be thought of as relating to particular motivational, cognitive, and affective mechanisms (DeYoung, 2015;. For example, pattern detection and curiosity for Openness-Intellect (Blain, Longenecker, et al, 2020;DeYoung et al, 2012) and reward sensitivity for Extraversion (Blain, Sassenberg, et al, 2020;Smillie et al, 2012). Agreeableness appears to reflect tendencies related to navigating social norms and coordinating with the needs of others (DeYoung, 2015;DeYoung & Weisberg, 2018).…”

“…Assessing variables of interest at the latent level allows for more robust conclusions, as latent variables capture only the shared variance of their indicators, thereby eliminating unsystematic error variance and more accurately capturing variability in the underlying constructs of interest (Keith, 2006). Single-task performance-based indicators are often limited in their scope and measure constructs narrower than those they purport to represent (Apperly, 2012;Blain, Longenecker et al, 2020). Performance on any given task is influenced by a number of task-specific factors, but using multi-indicator designs and latent variable frameworks allows us to move toward measuring constructs more reliably as what is shared across multiple tasks, thereby avoiding underestimation of true effect sizes (Blain, Longenecker et al, 2020;Enkavi et al, 2019;Eisenberg et al, 2019;Campbell & Fiske, 1959;Nosek & Smyth, 2007).…”

“…Single-task performance-based indicators are often limited in their scope and measure constructs narrower than those they purport to represent (Apperly, 2012;Blain, Longenecker et al, 2020). Performance on any given task is influenced by a number of task-specific factors, but using multi-indicator designs and latent variable frameworks allows us to move toward measuring constructs more reliably as what is shared across multiple tasks, thereby avoiding underestimation of true effect sizes (Blain, Longenecker et al, 2020;Enkavi et al, 2019;Eisenberg et al, 2019;Campbell & Fiske, 1959;Nosek & Smyth, 2007). Modeling social cognitive ability as the shared variance in performance across tasks should give a better representation of true variance in social cognitive ability by factoring out unique task variance (which includes a combination of task-specific variance and error).…”

“…Openness to Experience has also been linked to individual differences in default network function Beaty et al, 2016;Beaty et al, 2018). Openness is one aspect of the broader Openness-Intellect domain and encompasses artistic and aesthetic interests, fantasy proneness, and individual differences in pattern sensitivity and perceptual engagement (DeYoung, 2015;DeYoung et al, 2012;Blain, Longenecker, et al, 2020). Perhaps not surprisingly, function of the default network also relates to traits that empirically and theoretically overlap with Openness, such as creativity and mind wandering (Mason et al, 2007;Shin et al, 2015;Takeuchi et al, 2011), as well as positive symptoms of schizophrenia and related dimensional traits Whitfield-Gabrieli et al, 2009).…”