• Łukasz Gawęda, Renata Pionke, Martyna Krężołek, Katarzyna Prochwicz, Joanna Kłosowska, Dorota Frydecka, Błażej Misiak, Kamila Kotowicz, Agnieszka Samochowiec, Monika Mak, Piotr Błądziński, Andrzej Cechnicki, and Barnaby Nelson.
• Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Medical Center Hamburg Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany; II Department of Psychiatry, Medical University of Warsaw, Poland. Electronic address: lgaweda@wum.edu.pl.
• Psychiatry Res. 2018 Jan 1; 259: 571-578.

AbstractAlthough traumatic life events have been linked to psychotic-like experiences, the mechanisms of the relationship remain unclear. We investigated whether insecure (anxious and avoidant) attachment styles, cognitive biases and self-disturbances serve as significant mediators in the relationship between traumatic life events and psychotic-like experiences in non-clinical sample. Six-hundred and ninety healthy participants (522 females) who have not ever been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders took part in the study. Participants completed self-report scales that measure traumatic life events, psychotic-like experiences, cognitive biases, attachment styles and self-disturbances. Our model was tested with path analysis. Our integrated model fit to the data with excellent goodness-of-fit indices. The direct effect was significantly reduced after the mediators were included. Significant pathways from traumatic life events to psychotic-like experiences were found through self-disturbances and cognitive biases. Traumatic life events were associated with anxious attachment through cognitive biases. Self-disturbances, cognitive biases and anxious attachment had a direct effect on psychotic-like experiences. The results of our study tentatively suggest that traumatic life events are related with psychotic-like experiences through cognitive biases and self-disturbances. Further studies in clinical samples are required to verify our model.Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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