EI Scale Development 2a (USF)

The psychological experience of existential isolation (EI) entails the awareness of an “unbridgeable gap” between oneself and other people and things in the world. The present work focuses on the experience of existential isolation from the outside world, broadly, rather than existential isolation from other people more specifically. Theory suggests there may be two important dimensions of this self-world existential isolation (SWEI). One such dimension would reflect an awareness of the unbridgeable gap, in the form of the general feeling of disconnection between one’s mind and the outside world (participatory gap; SWEI-PG). Another such dimension would reflect an awareness of the unbridgeable gap, in the form of the general feeling that one does not really know what the reality of the outside world is truly like (epistemic gap; SWEI-EG). The present research therefore has two goals: First, it seeks to explore the factor structure of a pool of 28 candidate items that may or may not reflect these SWEI component dimensions. Second, once the factor structure has been explored, the present study also seeks to explore the associations between the SWEI measure and various other epistemic variables—including ideological dogmatism; intellectual humility; mind wandering; dissociation; magical thinking, spirituality, and mental causation; personal need for structure; and tolerance for ambiguity. We will explore the same associations while controlling for self-other existential isolation (Pinel et al., 2017).