Momentary Assessment of Aberrant Salience, Anomalous Self-Experiences, and Psychotic-Like Experiences

To improve understanding of emerging psychosis, researchers have identified potential precursory mechanisms that may momentarily precede psychotic-like experiences, including aberrant salience and anomalous self-experiences. Aberrant salience is the misattribution of significance to neutral stimuli and may be linked to atypical dopamine transmission. Anomalous self-experiences include changes in the experience of the self, which may alter top-down cognitive processes. The present study extends previous research on these phenomena by examining the momentary dynamics of aberrant salience, anomalous self-experiences, and psychotic-like experiences in daily life. Participants were 246 young adults who were prompted to complete 6 smartphone surveys daily for 7 days. Baseline measures of aberrant salience and anomalous self-experiences each predicted occurrence of the same phenomena in daily life, supporting the use of these measures to examine within-subject changes. Dynamic structural equation modeling was used to examine lagged effects. Both aberrant salience and anomalous self-experiences exhibited carryover effects across timepoints. Furthermore, aberrant salience and anomalous self-experiences were each associated with psychotic-like experiences at subsequent timepoints, above and beyond the carryover effects of psychotic-like experiences. These temporal relationships provide preliminary support consistent with social-cognitive models of psychosis and support further examination of the within-subject dynamics of aberrant salience and anomalous self-experiences at the momentary scale.