Browsing by Subject "maaginen ajattelu"

Objective: Previous experimental and cross-sectional studies have found that paranormal thinking increases under stressful situations and is associated with retrospectively reported early and recent stress-prone life events. It has been suggested that paranormal thinking might act as a means to increase one’s sense of controllability and understandability of life events when being under burden. To date, no study has investigated the associations between exhaustion and paranormal thinking. Therefore, the present study aimed to 1) examine the cross-sectional associations between exhaustion and paranormal thinking, 2) examine whether exhaustion predicts the development of paranormal thinking over an 11-year follow-up, and 3) investigate whether different developmental trajectories of exhaustion are differently associated with paranormal thinking. Methods: The participants (n = 906–2092) came from The Young Finns Study, which is a Finnish population-based on-going follow-up study consisting of six age cohorts (born between 1962 and 1977). Paranormal thinking was assessed in 2001 and 2012 with The Spiritual Acceptance vs. Rational Materialism questionnaire. Exhaustion was assessed in 2001, 2007 and 2012 with The Maastricht Vital Exhaustion questionnaire. The participants were 24-50-year-olds during the measurement years. The cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between exhaustion and paranormal thinking were examined using linear regression analyses. The analyses were adjusted for participants’ gender and age, and participants’ and their parents’ socioeconomic status. The associations of different developmental trajectories of vital exhaustion (i.e., consistently high, consistently low, increasing, or decreasing exhaustion over the 11-year follow-up) with paranormal thinking were examined using analyses of variance. Results and conclusion: The results of this study showed that high exhaustion was cross-sectionally associated with higher levels of paranormal thinking. Further, high vital exhaustion predicted higher development of paranormal thinking over the 11-year follow-up. Additionally, participants with consistently high exhaustion over the 11-year follow-up had higher levels of paranormal thinking, when compared to those without exhaustion or those with increasing levels of exhaustion over the 11-year follow-up. The findings provide novel evidence on the associations between exhaustion and paranormal thinking that had not been investigated before. Future research could examine whether paranormal thinking could act as a psychological coping strategy among exhausted individuals.

Objective: Paranormal ideation has been found to correlate with paranoid ideation. Both phenomena are present in psychotic disorders and are a part of psychosis continuum, but they are both common also in common population. Previous research on the relationship between paranormal and paranoid ideation is based on cross-sectional studies with relatively small and selected samples, so this study was conducted to find out whether paranoid ideation could predict the development of paranormal ideation in adulthood over 15 years. Methods: The data used in this study was from The Young Finns Study. Paranormal ideation was assessed with The Spiritual Acceptance Scale (SAS), a subscale of The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). Paranoid ideation was assessed with The Paranoid Ideation Scale (PIS), a subscale of the Symptom Checklist-90-Reviewed (SCL-90-R) questionnaire. The relationship between paranormal ideation and paranoid ideation was analyzed with growth curve modeling (N=1471, of which 56,8 % were women, the age range of the participants = 20–50 y.). Development of paranormal ideation (years 1997, 2001 and 2012) was set as the dependent variable and paranoid ideation from the same years was set as the independent variable. Childhood and adulthood socioeconomic factors were controlled for. Supplementary analyses were made using the same methods to examine the relationship between paranormal and paranoid ideation in the other direction (paranormal ideation predicting the trajectory of paranoid ideation). Results and conclusion: The main finding of this study was that paranoid ideation predicted the development of paranormal ideation over 15 years even after socioeconomic variables were controlled for. A similar relationship was also found in other direction: paranormal ideation predicted the development of paranormal ideation over 15 years. The relationship was found in both directions, from early adulthood to middle age, and in both genders. This study supported the relationship between paranormal and paranoid ideation found in earlier research. Based on previous research this relationship could be explained by cognitive biases or genetic or neurobiological factors. More research over the matter is needed to clarify the causal relationships between paranormal and paranoid ideation, and the factors explaining the relationship.