[survey] Tulpamancy Research Study and Thinking About Thinking

[Dre_coop]

Do you have 20 minutes to answer questions for our study about unusual experiences and metacognition? We are specifically interested in the experiences of Tulpamancers. [https://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/34760

[GrayTheCat]

I took the survey.

 

There was one question about trusting other people's opinions about my experiences. For the survey I assumed you meant other tulpamancers.

[Luminesce]

I hope questions like "Have you ever experienced the sensation that someone was there when they weren't" and many similar, weren't trying to ask about experiences of Tulpamancy itself. Tulpamancy is generally very intentional, and all the questions that were an easy "No" like feeling like I've been touched or whatnot, were also relatively easy "Yes"s if we count intentional mind-trickery like (the Tulpamancy skill) imposition. That stuff takes practice, time and effort though, it's very different from if you experience those things without intending to.

 

Edit: I hope you guys aren't putting high "Yes"s due to the experience of having a tulpa at all. Try to only answer based on unintentional experiences - including "tulpa"-related ones if your tulpas were natural and do stuff more on their own, maybe, but not if you've simply worked hard at accomplishing imposition and such.

 

Or, if otherwise, we'd need the surveyor to specify, since if that wasn't the intent it's far too vague. That'd be like someone reporting seeing illusions... after staring at an eye-tricking image/video

Edited January 24, 2020 by Luminesce

[Ember.Vesper]

The questions are all from standard psychological survey instruments and weren't written for this study:

 

Beck Cognitive Insight Scale
Metacognitions Questionnaire-30
Multi-Modality Unusual Sensory Experiences Questionnaire
Peters et al Delusions Inventory
Brief Core Schema Scales

 

The advantage of this is that tulpamancer responses can be easily compared to larger populations that have previously taken the surveys, both populations diagnosed with various mental illnesses and those not. Anecdotal evidence suggests that therapists and doctors can readily distinguish tulpamancers from delusional and schizophrenic patients, but it would be interesting to see if tulpamancers are also distinguishable with a simple written instrument.

 

The disadvantage is that the surveys were not written with any consideration of the possible existence of non-disordered plurality or intentional overriding of physical perceptions. So many of the questions seem odd or uncomfortable. They aren't likely to produce results that are insightful on the plural experience, independently of comparison with other populations.

 

As far as I can tell, "other people" means everybody you know or encounter, considered in aggregate.

 

There was one question that amused me. "Do your thoughts ever feel alien to you in some way?" No, *my* thoughts never do. But, of course, most of the thoughts I hear aren't mine.

 

Since we still haven't gotten anywhere with imposition, our results came out looking very mundane, regardless of how the questions are interpreted.

 

-Ember

[Luminesce]

I'm still worried people will mistake "Have you ever sensed something that wasn't there"-type questions as "Do you even have a tulpa at all". To the point where I'm not even sure the results will be reliable..

[uncannyfellow]

20 hours ago, Ember.Vesper said:

The advantage of this is that tulpamancer responses can be easily compared to larger populations that have previously taken the surveys, both populations diagnosed with various mental illnesses and those not. Anecdotal evidence suggests that therapists and doctors can readily distinguish tulpamancers from delusional and schizophrenic patients, but it would be interesting to see if tulpamancers are also distinguishable with a simple written instrument.

If that's the case, asking people in the context of a tulpamancy community is a waste of time. If a therapist gave this to me, my responses would depend heavily on whether or not I'm comfortable telling my therapist about tulpas. If it was on an anonymous survey given to the general population, I'd answer yes to a lot of questions on the basis of my plurality. But here, it's about subject/experimenter expectations. I thought the questions were about pathological psychosis and not about tulpas (whether or not tulpas are technically a form of psychosis, it's much harder to argue that they are pathological). So I said "Nope, no weird sensations of other people being around me!" because that's the answer I thought I wanted, and not because it's how I actually felt. Inasmuch as this survey will tell us anything, it tells us that tulpamancers know they are outside the norm, which you didn't need a survey to establish.

[GrayTheCat]

The survey questions asked for the occurrence of each symptom rather than the intensity of the symptoms, and I think that's a weakness of this survey. I assumed feeling the presence of other people didn't really mean me detecting Ranger's presence when I'm lonely but instead vividly hallucinating people grabbing you uncontrollably like people with schizophrenia or psychosis may experience, so I believe I replied no to those questions. I felt like this test seemed like it was screening for schizophrenia or psychosis, and I'm really confident I don't have either of those disorders.

I talked to my therapist a lot about tulpamancy, and she told me that labeling tulpamancy as schizophrenia is like putting a circle peg in a square hole. It will fit in, but it's not a good fit. There is some overlap, especially if you account for more advanced imposition, but it doesn't act as a good fit because tulpamancy in of itself does not create tons of distress. I'm not paranoid other people are going to hurt me, and I don't feel disturbed by Ranger being around. My distress about tulpamancy mostly stems from me feeling closeted in a way and too afraid to talk about it to my friends in fear of being shunned. As for the negative symptoms, I have some of those because I'm autistic, but I doubt other people have those. Disorganized thinking might be related to tulpamancy, but tulpamancy doesn't make it harder for me to focus because I can tell Ranger to leave me alone (and now that we can switch, I don't bother Ranger anymore).

I think it's important to test if tulpamancers have schizophrenia and or psychosis, but I was also a little disappointed the survey was not looking for anything else.

[Michen_S]

I did the survey. Though I don't have a psychotic illness, I feel like my autism skewed a number of the answers I gave in the sensory experiences section.

[Luminesce]

It's fine, it's not like anyone with abnormal answers can't take the survey, and if they didn't there'd be no point in doing it at all. My only concern was people misinterpreting the "sensing stuff that wasn't there" questions, everything else is fair game

[Ember.Vesper]

It would be hard to do a test comparing tulpamancers to non-tulpamancers without making a specific effort to recruit tulpamancers. But apparently the pre-test orientation was insufficient if different systems are replying differently for the same experiences.

At the very least we have:

*Cat assuming "other people" meant tulpamancers while I assumed it meant the general public.

*Lumi assuming imposition shouldn't count for unusual perceptions while I assumed it should.

*UF and Cat discounting headmate presence as being a sensation of other people present, when I assumed it did.

This is why researchers will often do follow-up interviews to refine their methodology.

In the context the questions were originally written, yes, they were screening for things like delusion, paranoia, and hallucination. On the other hand, the intro says:

"You have been asked to participate in this research because you have identified yourself as having a Tulpa, have not previously been diagnosed with any psychotic disorder, nor have a family history of a psychotic illness (e.g. mother or father), and are aged 18 or above."

This implies that any unusual responses are assumed by the current researcher to have a reasonable possibility of not being a sign of mental illness even if most other researchers using the same instruments would assume those responses to be suggestive of mental illness.

-Ember