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Updated: Jul 5, 2026

Use of a Psychophysiological Script-driven Imagery Experiment to Study Trauma-related Dissociation in Borderline Personality Disorder
Published on: March 8, 2018
Is there really a dissociative taxon on the dissociative experiences scale?
Rebecca Davis Merritt1, Sungeun You
1Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2004, USA. merritt@psych.purdue.edu
Abstract:
The Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES; Bernstein & Putnam, 1986) and MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1940) were administered to 1,237 college students to evaluate MMPI differences for nonpathological (n = 90) or pathological dissociators (n = 111) and nondissociative controls (n = 476). MMPIs of both dissociation groups had multiple clinical elevations with a mean 8-9 code. People classified in the pathological dissociation group had MMPI scores remarkably similar to those in the normal dissociation group. The DES and DES-Taxon (DES-T; Waller, Putnam, & Carlson, 1996) were also highly correlated. Our findings strongly suggest the DES-T does not uniquely identify categorical dissociation.
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