Relationships between Unusual Perceptions, Unusual Beliefs and Spiritual Experience

Description

Having unusual beliefs and unusual perceptions, like magical thinking, ideas of reference, and hallucination-like experiences have long been considered symptoms of mental illness, schizophrenia, schizotypal personality disorder and schizotypy as a pathological personality trait complex, to mention a few. Although psychotic symptoms are considered highly pathological, studies show that they are not always necessarily associated with mental illness (Yaden & Newberg,2022). The difficulty to recognize spiritual phenomena from pathology is one of the complications that professionals face when working with clients who experience altered states of consciousness (Schapiro, 2018).. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between spiritual experience and schizotypal personality traits in a sample of 299 non-clinical Latvian women. Data were collected using three self-assessment scales – Mysticism Scale (Hood, 1975; Hood et al., 2001) adapted into Latvian (Bitēna & Mārtinsone, 2020), Latvian Clinical Personality inventory(Perepjolkina et al., 2020) and sociodemographic data survey. . The results show no significant correlation between a spiritual experience (mystical experience) and the overall indicator of schizotypy (rs = .17, p = .003). Results showed that only two of the nine schizotypy traits were significantly positively related to spiritual experience – unusual beliefs (rs = .41, p < .001), and unusual perceptions (rs = .37, p < .001). . The results can be interpreted as supportive to the view that unusual beliefs and unusual perceptions are not always symptoms of mental illness. The results offer a topic for the discussion of why spiritual experience and schizotypal personality traits overlap. This research also adds evidence for further debate, on why spiritual phenomena are often considered pathological. These findings are helpful for further research that aim to distinguish the symptoms of mental illness from the signs of spiritual experience.

Period	29 Mar 2023
Event title	RSU Research week 2023: Society. Health. Welfare
Event type	Conference
Conference number	9
Organiser	Rīga Stradiņš University
Location	Riga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International