Immersion in altered experience: An investigation of the relationship between absorption and psychopathology

Understanding alterations in perceptual experiences as a component of the basic symptom structure of psychosis may improve early detection and the identification of subtle shifts that can precede symptom onset or exacerbation. We explored the phenomenological construct of absorption and psychotic experiences in both clinical (bipolar psychosis and schizophrenia spectrum) and non-clinical participants. Participants with psychosis endorsed significantly higher absorption compared to the non-clinical group. Absorption was positively correlated with all types of hallucinations and multiple types of delusions. The analysis yielded two distinct cluster groups that demarcated a distinction along the continuum of self-disturbance: on characterized by attenuated ego boundaries and the other stable ego boundaries. The study suggests that absorption is a potentially important but under-researched component of psychosis that overlaps with, but is not identical to the more heavily theorized constructs of aberrant salience and hyperreflexivity.