Psychoticism (P) and the "autistic personality"

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Back in 1952, Hans Eysenck started publishing on a personality trait he called psychoticism, that is basically a set of character traits found in highly creative people, but also in people vulnerable to psychosis (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder) and also in some personality disorders (schizoid, schizotypal). He published a lot on this, and it is one of the scales in the Big Three (which seems to have lost out to the Big Five these days). He did not include autistic people in his research, probably because of how long ago it was (he died in 1997).

Here's his short description of traits found in people high in psychoticism (P):
aggressive; cold; egocentric; impersonal; impulsive; antisocial; unempathic; creative; tough-minded

This may look familiar since it's quite a lot like how people describe the "autistic personality", though most of us would probably rewrite it to look more like: detached, focussed, empathic with people we're close to but not given to sympathy over day-to-day events with people we don't know well; creative; impulsive; antisocial in the "don't bug me I'm busy" sense . . . . And when you rewrite it to look more positive it does look a lot like how most people would describe the creative type (who is not easy to live with when busy creating).

Curebies think autistic people seem high in P because of lack of opportunity to socialize growing up, but aren't, really, and they want to prevent people from becoming socially stunted. Anti-cure types seem to have the opposite opinion, that we're naturally high-P and that that part of us does not need fixing. If autistic people appear to be high-P, is it because we're like that deep down, or is it superficial because of undersocialization, or is it some combination, or does it depend on which subtype (perhaps not yet described) we are?

Also: are all people on the autistic spectrum high-P? Or is there any relationship between autism and personality? Or are autistic people high-P because it's part of the diagnostic criteria, and low-P autists are being diagnosed as something else? Or what?

If I haven't completely lost people yet, I have a copy of the big three on my web site. If people want to take it and report their scores here, go ahead.

big three (EPQ-R)

For my browser (Safari), you can get your scores and then not email the results. I don't know how it will work for other browsers.

Extroversion: 2 out of 23. VERY LOW

Psychotism: 8 out of 24. LOW

Neuroticism: 20 out of 21. VERY HIGH

Lie Scale: 5 out of 21. LOW

I found the questionnaire silly and misleading. There are too many questions which simply cannot be answered with yes or no (do manners and cleanliness matter to me? Manners do; cleanliness doesn't. How am I supposed to answer?), too many which are context-specific, and too many which are silly because they apply to pretty much everyone (I imagine almost everyone has, at some point in their life, taken something which wasn't theirs. But there IS a difference between taking a friend's pencil when you were eight vs. shoplifting every day. It's idiotic to pretend that every yes means the same thing here. Likewise, who has never boasted about anything, or said anything nasty to anyone in their whole life?)

Extroversion: 6 out of 23. Kinda low

Psychotism: 20 out of 24. High

Neuroticism: 20 out of 21. High

Lie Scale: 3 out of 21. Very Low

I agree some of the questions were hard to answer with a simple yes or a no, but overall my scores accurately describe me. I do have bipolar disorder, I'm prone to huge seasonal shifts in mood between mania and depression, mixed states and and even psyhcosis from time to time.....I also do have an ASD (dx'ed classic autism, but high functioning in adulthood), so I'm not sure if the P or the N score would be lower if I wasn't bipolar.

Extroversion: 4 out of 23.
Psychotism: 16 out of 32.
Neuroticism: 21 out of 24.
Lie Scale: 8 out of 21.

Yeah, I'm about half-way completely psychotic.

The form didn't work for me. I answered every question and clicked the button to "Check scores and email answers" and nothing happened. Complete waste of time. Perhaps it doesn't work with Firefox browser?

Don't take the quiz if you're using Opera 9.02, for reference. The button at the bottom doesn't work for me.

I know people who are on the spectrum with the described traits of high P, except they'r not necessarilly creative.

Oops. Good to know that. Actually, now that I think about it, the button requires javascript, and if you have javascript turned off, it won't work.

If anyone wants to do the test and the form doesn't work, I can always score it for you and send you the results.

Thanks for the feedback.

I should have posted this, too, in case anyone didn't see it in the pop up window with the scores:

Means published with scale:
Psychoticism: men 7.19, women 5.73; range 0-32;
Extraversion: men 12.51, women 14.14; range 0-23;
Neuroticism: men: 10.54, women 12.47; range 0-24;
Lie Scale: men 7.1, women 6.88; range 0-21

It also doesn't work in IE7 (yes, with JavaScript enabled). If it doesn't work in Firefox 2.0 either, I wonder what browsers it does work in.

I got high N

Badly flawed tests because it used too many absolutes. You have to have a wider range of possible responses and clearer questions for it to have any validity.

Well, it's been used worldwide, translated into many languages, so somebody thinks it's an ok scale. My main problem with the concept is how negative the concepts of neuroticism and psychoticism sound, and also how they included psychopathy questions on the P scale - I think they should have stuck with psychoses and creativity and left psychopathy/criminality out, since so much of that is environment and they're supposed to be measuring inherent temperament. At least the scale exists. It's a starting point.

I'm wondering if this has anything to do with xml versus html. It's supposed to be basic code, compatible with everything. I need to get rich so I can go interactive database so it won't matter.

What browser(s) did you test on?