Psychiatric framing affects positive but not negative schizotypy scores in psychology and medical students

Abstract

When testing risk for psychosis, we regularly rely on self-report questionnaires. Yet, the more that people know about this condition, the more they might respond defensively, in particular with regard to the more salient positive symptom dimension. In two studies, we investigated whether framing provided by questionnaire instructions might modulate responses on self-reported positive and negative schizotypy. The O-LIFE (UK study) or SPQ (New Zealand study) questionnaire was framed in either a "psychiatric", "creativity", or "personality" (NZ only) context. We tested psychology students (without taught knowledge about psychosis) and medical students (with taught knowledge about psychosis; UK only). We observed framing effects in psychology students in both studies: positive schizotypy scores were lower after the psychiatric compared to the creativity instruction. However, schizotypy scores did not differ between the creativity and personality framing conditions, suggesting that the low scores with psychiatric framing reflect defensive responding. The same framing effect was also observed in medical students, despite their lower positive schizotypy scores overall. Negative schizotypy scores were not affected by framing in either study. These results highlight the need to reduce response biases when studying schizotypy, because these might blur schizotypy-behaviour relationships.

Creative Competencies and Cognitive Processes Associated with Creativity are Linked with Positive Schizotypy

“…This study is based on self-report questionnaires, which could represent a limit, considering that individuals with high positive schizotypy might display a tendency to respond defensively, depending on the instructions they received to answer a survey (Mohr, Schofield, Leonards, Wilson, & Grimshaw, 2018). However, this report also showed that presenting a survey as a creativity study, which is the case of our survey, minimizes defensive responses.…”