Schizotypal personality can be perceived as a personality trait and considered as a dimension. In recent decades, this way of thinking has been promoted by a British psychologist Gordon Claridge, the main author of the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE) schizotypy scale, which is the subject of this article. In such dimensional model, schizotypy represents a continu...

Contagious yawning is a common, but poorly understood phenomenon. We hypothesized that contagious yawning is part of a more general phenomenon known as mental state attribution (i.e. the ability to inferentially model the mental states of others). To test this hypothesis we compared susceptibility to contagiously yawn with performance on a self-face recognition task, several theory of mind stor...

OBJECTIVE Although much attention has been given to the effects of adverse childhood experiences on the development of personality disorders (PDs), we know far less about how recent life events influence the ongoing course of functioning. We examined the extent to which PD subjects differ in rates of life events and the extent to which life events impact psychosocial functioning. METHOD A tot...

The identification of endophenotypes in the personality disorders may provide a basis for the identification of underlying genotypes that influence the traits and dimensions of the personality disorders, as well as susceptibility to major psychiatric illnesses. Clinical dimensions of personality disorders that lend themselves to the study of corresponding endophenotypes include affective instab...

OBJECTIVE The authors assessed the growth of the literature on the topic of personality disorders before and after publication of DSM-III. METHOD A MEDLINE search was conducted for journal articles concerning the personality disorders that were published from 1966 to 1995. RESULTS Contrary to the authors' prediction, the growth of this literature was slower after the publication of DSM-III ...

Epidemiological studies suggest that auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) occur in approximately 10%-15% of the general population, of whom only a small proportion has a clinically relevant psychotic disorder. It is unclear whether these hallucinations occur as an isolated phenomenon or if AVH in nonclinical individuals are part of a more general susceptibility to schizophrenia. For this study,...

Three groups of hospitalized adolescents (schizophrenics, schizotypal personalities, and borderline personality adolescent adjustment reactions) with 10 subjects in each group were compared for their ability to identify masked and unmasked stimuli. Results revealed that the schizophrenic group required longer minimum exposure durations for criterion identification of unmasked stimuli than the o...

BACKGROUND Prior studies of common disorders in community-dwelling adults identified internalizing and externalizing spectra of mental illness. We investigated the placement of schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder in this framework and tested the validity of the resulting organization in a clinical population. METHODS The data came from the Suffolk County Mental Health Project c...