Schizotypal thinking and associative processing: a response commonality analysis of verbal fluency.

Objective: To determine whether people with high scores for schizotypal thinking generate more uncommon words in a letter fluency task than people with low scores.
Design: Prospective study.
Setting: University psychology department.
Patients: Forty healthy, right-handed students.
Interventions: Students were administered the Magical Ideation (MI) Scale and a 2-minute letter fluency task in which they named as many nouns as possible beginning with "A" or "F," in any order.
Outcome Measures: Total number of words produced and percentage of unique, rare and common words (as determined by the responses of the whole group); scores on MI scale.
Results: Participants with high scores (above the median) on the MI scale generated as many words as those who had low scores. People in both groups also generated a comparable number of unique words (named by only 1 person) and common words (named by 6 or more people). As hypothesized, people with high scores on the MI scale generated more rare words (named by fewer than 6 people) than those with low scores.
Conclusions: These findings support the view of a disinhibition of semantic network functioning as the neuropsychological basis of creative thought, magical ideation and thought disorder.