Continued word association in hypothetically psychosis-prone college students.

White male undergraduates who scored deviantly high (2 standard deviations above the mean) on the Physical Anhedonia Scale, the Perceptual Aberration/Magical Ideation (Per/Mag) Scale, or the Nonconformity Scale were compared with controls on either a structured (n?=?63) or an unstructured (n?=?81) continued word-association task. This task has often been used as a measure of psychotic thought disorder. On the unstructured word-association task, Per/Mag Ss produced proportionately more unusual idiosyncratic responses, proportionately fewer common responses, fewer popular responses, and lower response commonality scores than did controls, and these differences were due to those Per/Mag Ss who had also scored at least 1 standard deviation above the mean on the Nonconformity Scale. These findings show mild cognitive slippage in these Ss. Results support the validity of the Per/Mag Scale as a measure of psychosis proneness and the validity of the Nonconformity Scale as a potentiator in the identification of psychosis proneness. (48 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)