The Aberrant Salience Inventory: A new measure of psychosis proneness.

Abstract

Aberrant salience is the unusual or incorrect assignment of salience, significance, or importance to otherwise innocuous stimuli and has been hypothesized to be important for psychosis and psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. Despite the importance of this concept in psychosis research, no questionnaire measures are available to assess aberrant salience. The current research describes 4 studies designed to develop and validate the Aberrant Salience Inventory (ASI) as a measure of aberrant salience. In Study 1, an overinclusive item pool was subjected to an exploratory factor analysis, and items were kept or discarded based on factor loadings. In Study 2, the 5-factor structure of the ASI was confirmed with a confirmatory factor analysis, and a 2nd-order factor analysis found evidence consistent with a single higher order factor. Study 2 also provided support for the scale score's convergent validity as the ASI was strongly associated with psychosis-proneness measures and dissociation measures and moderately correlated with measures associated with levels of dopamine. This study also provided support for its discriminant validity as the ASI was only weakly associated with social anhedonia. Study 3 found that participants with elevated psychosis proneness had increased ASI scores, but in contrast, participants with elevated social anhedonia had similar scores to comparison participants. Finally, Study 4 found that participants with a history of psychosis had elevated ASI scores compared to a psychiatric comparison group. Overall, the ASI demonstrated sound psychometric properties and may be useful for measuring aberrant salience and psychosis proneness in clinical and nonclinical samples.

Scale development: ten main limitations and recommendations to improve future research practices

“…After EFA and CFA, convergent validity was the preferred technique used in the vast majority of the studies included in this review (e.g., Brun et al 2014;Cicero et al 2010). This finding is consistent with prior research (Bastos et al 2010).…”

“…Furthermore, Cicero et al (2010) reported that the main limitation of their study was the fact that none of the items were reverse-scored. Although some methodologists claim that reverse scoring is necessary to avoid acquiescence among participants, this advice should be taken with caution.…”

“…Although some methodologists claim that reverse scoring is necessary to avoid acquiescence among participants, this advice should be taken with caution. There are reports that the reversescored items may be confusing to participants, that the opposite of a construct reverse-scored may be fundamentally different than the construct, that reversescored items tend to be the worst fitting items in factor analyses, or that the factor structure of scales includes a factor with straightforward wording compared to a reverse-scored factor (Cicero et al 2010). Awareness of these issues is necessary for future researchers to choose between avoiding acquiescence among participants or preventing a number of other problems related to the use of reverse scores.…”

Toward an exploration of feeling of strangeness in schizophrenia: Perspectives on acousmatic and everyday listening.

“…The overevaluation of familiarity indicated that patients might experience meaningless sounds as more significant than healthy subjects in agreement with schizophrenic individuals' perceptual reports by using the ASI scale (Cicero et al, 2010) and with the aberrant salience hypothesis developed by Kapur. This result might be accurately compared with previous ones from Nielzen, Olsson, and Ohman (1993), who demonstrated that patients judged complex nonverbal nonenvironmental sounds as more attractive than healthy subjects.…”

“…To interpret the behavioral and electrophysiological results of this study, two main perspectives afford us a theoretical framework, which are inspired from the perceptual scales previously cited: the hypothesis of "sensory gating deficit" (related to SIAPA; Bunney et al, 1999) and the "aberrant salience" hypothesis (related to ASI; Cicero et al, 2010). These two fi-ameworks will be considered as complementary.…”