‘Psychoticism’ and Psychotic Illness

This study concerns the scores on a questionnaire measure of ‘Psychoticism’ of patients with a diagnosed psychotic illness. Eysenck (1952) postulated the existence of three main dimensions of personality—Extra-version, Neuroticism and Psychoticism. The label ‘Psychoticism’ as used to suggest the hypothesis: ‘that there exists a set of correlated behaviour variables indicative of predisposition to psychoticbreakdown, demonstrableas a continuous variable in the normal population and independent of E and N (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1968a). Psychotically ill patients are held to mark the extreme end of this dimension.