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      The Watts Connectedness Scale: a new scale for measuring a sense of connectedness to self, others, and world

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          Abstract

          Rationale

          A general feeling of disconnection has been associated with mental and emotional suffering. Improvements to a sense of connectedness to self, others and the wider world have been reported by participants in clinical trials of psychedelic therapy. Such accounts have led us to a definition of the psychological construct of ‘connectedness’ as ‘a state of feeling connected to self, others and the wider world’. Existing tools for measuring connectedness have focused on particular aspects of connectedness, such as ‘social connectedness’ or ‘nature connectedness’, which we hypothesise to be different expressions of a common factor of connectedness. Here, we sought to develop a new scale to measure connectedness as a construct with these multiple domains. We hypothesised that (1) our scale would measure three separable subscale factors pertaining to a felt connection to ‘self’, ‘others’ and ‘world’ and (2) improvements in total and subscale WCS scores would correlate with improved mental health outcomes post psychedelic use.

          Objectives

          To validate and test the ‘Watts Connectedness Scale’ (WCS).

          Methods

          Psychometric validation of the WCS was carried out using data from three independent studies. Firstly, we pooled data from two prospective observational online survey studies. The WCS was completed before and after a planned psychedelic experience. The total sample of completers from the online surveys was N = 1226. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were performed, and construct and criterion validity were tested. A third dataset was derived from a double-blind randomised controlled trial (RCT) comparing psilocybin-assisted therapy ( n = 27) with 6 weeks of daily escitalopram ( n = 25) for major depressive disorder (MDD), where the WCS was completed at baseline and at a 6-week primary endpoint.

          Results

          As hypothesised, factor analysis of all WCS items revealed three main factors with good internal consistency. WCS showed good construct validity. Significant post-psychedelic increases were observed for total connectedness scores (η2 = 0.339, p < 0.0001), as well as on each of its subscales ( p < 0.0001). Acute measures of ‘mystical experience’, ‘emotional breakthrough’, and ‘communitas’ correlated positively with post-psychedelic changes in connectedness ( r = 0.42, r = 0.38, r = 0.42, respectively, p < 0.0001). In the RCT, psilocybin therapy was associated with greater increases in WCS scores compared with the escitalopram arm ( η p 2 = 0.133, p = 0.009).

          Conclusions

          The WCS is a new 3-dimensional index of felt connectedness that may sensitively measure therapeutically relevant psychological changes post-psychedelic use. We believe that the operational definition of connectedness captured by the WCS may have broad relevance in mental health research.

          Supplementary Information

          The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00213-022-06187-5.

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          Most cited references112

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          Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests

          Psychometrika, 16(3), 297-334
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            The weirdest people in the world?

            Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
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              Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM)

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                contact@drrosalindwatts.com
                Leor.roseman13@imperial.ac.uk
                Journal
                Psychopharmacology (Berl)
                Psychopharmacology (Berl)
                Psychopharmacology
                Springer Berlin Heidelberg (Berlin/Heidelberg )
                0033-3158
                1432-2072
                8 August 2022
                8 August 2022
                : 1-23
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.7445.2, ISNI 0000 0001 2113 8111, Centre for Psychedelic Research, , Imperial College London, ; London, UK
                [2 ]Acer Integration, London, UK
                [3 ]Synthesis Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands
                [4 ]GRID grid.5012.6, ISNI 0000 0001 0481 6099, Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, , Maastricht University, ; Maastricht, Netherlands
                [5 ]GRID grid.266102.1, ISNI 0000 0001 2297 6811, Psychedelics Division, Department of Neurology, , University of California San Francisco, ; Neuroscape, USA
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9990-6029
                Article
                6187
                10.1007/s00213-022-06187-5
                9358368
                35939083
                e3ad3fec-63ce-4e85-abea-0bb9d8f815a3
                © The Author(s) 2022

                Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 29 October 2021
                : 27 June 2022
                Funding
                Funded by: Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust
                Categories
                Original Investigation

                Pharmacology & Pharmaceutical medicine
                psychedelics,psilocybin,alienation,community,transpersonal,nature-connectedness,relational,depression,transdiagnostic,therapy

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