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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. On the psychology of paranormal belief and experience Milan Valášek Exam No. B018045 Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology to The University of Edinburgh February 2015 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is of my own composition, and that it contains no material previously submitted for the award of any other degree. The work reported in this thesis has been executed by myself, except where due acknowledgement is made in the text. Signed, Milan Valášek 3 Acknowledgements I would not be able to complete this thesis without the help and support of my supervisors, colleagues, and friends. I am very fortunate to have been supervised by Caroline Watt, whose support and guidance, in both professional and personal life, were of immense help to me throughout the course of my doctoral studies. Both she and my secondary supervisor, Sergio Della Sala, were always available to give advice, whenever I needed it. Apart from my supervisory team, I am especially thankful to Iva Čukić for her friendship as well as our countless conversations, never boring, sometimes heated, but always stimulating, from which I learnt a great deal. I am also grateful to Stuart Ritchie for his help and collegial mentorship that helped me settle into the unfamiliar environment of British academia. Furthermore, I would like to thank Tom Booth and René Mõttus for their incessant willingness to give advice regarding statistics. I have also greatly benefited from interacting with colleagues far more knowledgeable than myself, namely Tim Bates, Mark Adams, Mario Parra Rodriguez, Calen Walshe, and Alex Weiss. The journey towards my PhD would not be the same without my fellow students. Drew Altschul, Catherine Crompton, Marieke Gartner, Dave Hill, Irina Kozlova, Jia Loy, Louisa Miller, Aja Murray, Swantje Müller, Sebastián Sandoval Similä, Vanessa Williams, and many others, including the members of the Differential Journal Club, past and present, have all made it a much more pleasant and stimulating experience than it would have been without their friendship. I would also not be able to succeed in this task without the love and emotional support I received from Lenka Molčanová, Kyna Reeves, Alex Fleischmann, and my other dear close friends in Edinburgh and Bratislava. Last but not least, I am grateful to my parents, Silvia and Milan, for supporting me throughout my life. 5 Note Modified versions of Studies 1, 2, and 3 have been published prior to the submission of this thesis. Studies 4 and 5 are, at the time of writing, under review. For references, see the list of publications in Appendix E. In order to acknowledge the contributions of co-authors and advisors, “we” will be used instead of “I” throughout this thesis. All research reported in the following chapters of this thesis has been reviewed and approved by the University of Edinburgh's Psychology Department research ethics board. All analyses were conducted using the R software version 2.15.3 (R Core Team, 2012) and IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 19 (IBM Corp., 2010). The list of R packages used for analyses along with citations can be found in Appendix F. All reported p-values are 2-tailed, unless stated otherwise. Throughout the text, CI* refers to bias-corrected and accelerated confidence intervals based on a bootstrap sample of N = 2,000. 7 Lay Summary The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of paranormal beliefs and experiences. The introduction provides a review of past research in the field and the rationale for our decision to focus on a specific type of paranormal experience – precognitive, or prophetic, dreams. We address several different hypotheses that have been proposed to account for such experiences. Chapter II describes an online dream precognition study testing the so-called psi hypothesis (Study 1). Participants collected their dreams over four weekly periods. Independent judges rated the similarity of the dream reports to a set of video clips. The dreams were found to be more similar to the video clips than could be expected by chance alone. However, based on further exploration of the data, we concluded that these results did not support the notion that dreams can provide information about the future. They did, however, illustrate the potential theoretical and methodological issues with the psi hypothesis and the way it is commonly tested. Chapter III focuses on explanations of precognitive dreams in terms of unconscious cognition. Two studies test the hypothesis that precognitive dreams arise as a result of unconscious inferences about likely future events based on subtle cues from the environment perceived in the absence of awareness. We predicted that participants with prior precognitive dream experience would perform better at measures of learning without awareness. However, no such relationship was found. Additionally, we predicted that performance on a task assessing perception without awareness would be related to belief in and experience of precognitive dreams. The results did not support this prediction. Study 4, reported in Chapter IV, explores several demographic and sleep- and dream-related variables and their relationship with precognitive dream belief and experience. We hypothesised that precognitive dream experience is associated with erratic patterns of sleep behaviour. As predicted, we found that a higher subjective 9 frequency of precognitive dreams was associated with more nocturnal awakenings, higher dream recall, lower overall sleep quality, and a higher likelihood of using sleep medication. We also explored the demographic factors of precognitive dream belief and experience, namely gender, age and education. Women were more likely to believe in the reality of precognitive dreams as well as report experiencing them. And there was a negative relationship between completed years of formal education and the precognitive dream variables. Frequency of these experiences was positively related to age. Moreover, we found support for our prediction that both precognitive dream belief and experience would be positively related to the subjective importance ascribed to one’s dreams in general. Finally, the study investigated the relationship between the belief in and the experience of precognitive dreams. Although, as could be expected, we found these two to be strongly positively related, we argued that this relationship is not sufficient to gloss over the conceptual distinction. In order to further develop our line of research, we identify a need for a new measurement tool addressing attitudes towards one’s precognitive dream experiences. Study 5, reported in Chapter V, concerns the development of such a questionnaire. A subset of people who reported having had such experience completed the questionnaire. After removing problematic items, the questionnaire was found to be satisfactory and additional variables collected on the sample were subsequently used to test its validity. Overall, the predicted relationships were confirmed by the analyses, which indicates the questionnaire is validity. Importantly, we found that personal significance of one’s precognitive dreams was related to the frequency with which they are experienced. Chapter VI, reports two studies exploring the relationship between precognitive dream belief and experience, their personal significance and memory. Study 6 tested three hypotheses: earliest precognitive dream experiences would tend to date to a period of identity formation in 10 one’s life; the vividness of the memory of this earliest experience would be related to the frequency of precognitive dream experience; and this relationship would be accounted for by the personal significance ascribed to one’s precognitive dreams. All three hypotheses were supported. Finally, Chapter VII summarises the findings of the six studies conducted for this dissertation. We discuss our results in the context of the existing literature and highlight the main theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions of our research. Directions for future research are also provided. 11 Thesis abstract The aim of the present dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of putative paranormal beliefs and experiences. The introduction provides a conceptual analysis of past research into the paranormal and establishes the rationale for our decision to focus on a specific type of paranormal experience – precognitive dreams. The dissertation evaluates several different hypotheses that have been proposed to account for such experiences. Chapter II describes an online dream precognition study testing the so-called psi hypothesis
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