Mystical and Affective Aspects of Psychedelic Use in a Naturalistic Setting: A Linguistic Analysis of Online Experience Reports

ABSTRACT

Analyzing online retrospective experience reports of psychedelic use can provide valuable insight into their acute subjective effects. Such reports are unexplored in relation to mystical states, which are thought to be a therapeutic mechanism within psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. We created a set of words that, when encountered in an experience report, indicate the occurrence of mystical elements within the experience. We used the Shroomery.org website to retrieve 7317 publicly available retrospective psychedelic experience reports of psychedelic use, primarily of psilocybin, and have a designated experience intensity level self-assessed by the text authors during submission of the report. We counted the mystical language words using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software and additionally performed sentiment analysis of all reports. We found that the occurrence of mystical language grew with increased self-reported experience intensity. We also found that negative sentiment increased, and positive sentiment decreased as self-reported psychedelic experience intensity increased. These two findings raise the question of whether mystical experiences can co-exist with challenging elements within the psychedelic experience, a consideration for future qualitative studies. We present a new mystical language dictionary measure for further use and expansion, with some suggestions on how it can be used in future studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychedelics
• psilocybin
• mystical states
• sentiment
• language analysis
• experience reports

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Ythan from Shroomery.org for kindly giving us permission to use their experience report data. We also thank both language experts who provided their input on our mystical language dictionary for their time and effort.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors’ contributions

M.F.Ž., I.B. and D.H. developed the idea for the study. M.F.Ž., A.M. and G.K. developed the study methodology. A.M. performed the data extraction. A.M., S.Lj.M., and M.F.Ž. created the mystical language dictionary. D.H., G.K., I.B., and M.F.Ž. analyzed and interpreted the data. M.F.Ž. drafted the manuscript, and A.M, S.Lj.M., G.K., I.B., and D.H. helped revise it and subsequently approved the final version for publication. All authors are responsible and accountable for the content of the manuscript.

Data availability statement

The dataset used in this study and the LIWC dictionary file for the Mystical language dictionary are both publicly accessible at the Open Science Framework, DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/6PH8Z.

Appendix A: Descriptions of experience intensity levels, mystical language dictionary development

Definitions of experience intensity levels in the Shroomery.org database

Mystical language dictionary development

Personal characteristics of the dictionary development team

M.F. Ž. is a medical doctor who has experience in relation to the topic of psychedelics, as her doctoral dissertation deals with the topic of psychedelic research and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

S. Lj. M. obtained his Master’s degree in English Language and Literature, as well as Philosophy, at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia.

A. M. has no significant previous experience or knowledge on psychedelics and was introduced to the topic during the study. In this way, authors who participated in the dictionary development were of different backgrounds and perspectives.

Initial word generation and piloting

Three of the study authors (M. F. Ž., A. M., S. Lj. M.) first independently generated and joined together a list of n=63 words related to mystical experiences, before accessing any of the experience reports (a priori). We used the theoretical foundation by Stace in order to guide our dictionary creation, focusing on the seven dimensions of the mystical experience (Stace, 1980a, b). All dimensions were used except for Noetic quality and Paradoxicality. It was difficult for a single world to define these constructs, as a phrase would be more appropriate but cannot be counted by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software.

After finalizing the initial list of dictionary words, the aim was to examine how these words look in context and whether any of the experience reports that contain them read as texts describing mystical states. Specifically, the aim was to check whether some of our words were associated with “false positives” – experiences that contained the word but could not be judged as mystical. Each experience was reviewed by two of the authors. They first determined if they thought it was a mystical experience (yes/no/unsure). The criteria by Stace were used as a general guideline to determine if an experience is mystical or not (Stace, 1980b). However, the final assessment was subjective; we did not quantify how many of Stace’s dimensions an experience report contained to make a decision. We did not determine a firm cut-off (e.g. the word needs to appear in 5/10 experiences in a mystical context) to include a word, but rather focused on a general assessment of various meanings and contexts for the word. For the same reason, a decision was made to use a consensus-based method of selecting words, because the piloting stage showed a high complexity and variability of word meanings as they are used in different contexts within the experience reports.

For each word, we extracted the sentence in which it appeared within the experience report. For each experience rated as mystical by both assessors, there was an option of additionally extracting relevant words that were not included in the dictionary so far, as long as they were in accordance with one of Stace’s dimensions of the mystical experience. Some words that were generated a priori were immediately excluded due to low specificity when encountered in examples (e.g. “vision” could be used in the context of “revelatory visions”, but also as “my vision began to change”, which was not specific for mystical states). Some examples of exclusion reasons were low specificity, confounding meanings, and instances of negative emotional tone associated with the word (Table A.2). At the end of this step, the dictionary word list amounted to n=128 words.

Table A.1. Experience intensity level system used within the Shroomery.org experience report database.

Table A.2. Examples of reasons for word exclusion during dictionary development.

Table A.3. The mystical language dictionary in LIWC. Words are listed A-Z and are not case-sensitive. The asterisk (*) is used as the truncation wildcard i.e., to find words with all possible endings in place of the asterisk.

Independent assessment

Each of the three authors independently assessed each word by choosing include, exclude, or unsure. Words that had two “include” or “exclude” judgements were automatically advanced to the next step. Any discrepancies were addressed through a joint discussion. All discrepancies were verbally resolved, and joint consensus was achieved on which words to exclude or include. This step ended with a list of n=81 dictionary words. Discussion among the authors resulted in a large number of words related to the Deeply felt positive emotion dimension of mystical stated to be excluded. For example, the word joyful was commonly used in non-mystical contexts, i.e. “I was joyful because I managed to finally obtain some shrooms”. We only kept words related to this dimension that appeared in more serious contexts and conveyed a deeper and more complex or elevated emotion, such as the words serenity or rapture.

Sensitivity analysis related to the dictionary word “God”

The word God was a subject of discussion, as it can include highly relevant mystical and divine visions, but can also appear in phrases such as “Oh my God!”. The authors decided to include the word, but to later perform a sensitivity analysis with the word excluded when conducting the final statistical analysis to see whether the inclusion of the word impacts the results.

We created two separate dictionaries, one with the word God and one without it. LIWC scores were generated using both of them. We used Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient to compare mystical language scores and mystical language scores without God. Mystical language scores showed a high positive correlation (ρ=0.813, p<0.001) with mystical language scores without God. We considered this sufficient rationale to only report results from mystical language scores with the word God included in the Results sub-section of our manuscript.

Expert panel assessment

We invited two independent English language experts (completed a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature) uninvolved in the study (one of them also with a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature) to assess the face validity of our dictionary word list. For each word we asked them the following question: “Does this word reflect the psychological state of a mystical experience, if you imagine it appearing in a sentence, without looking at the context of the surrounding words in the sentence?” The experts were provided with an excerpt from the review paper by Barrett and Griffiths (2018) as introductory reading material on the definition of mystical experiences. They were encouraged to look up word definitions in the Oxford Dictionary for the sake of consistency in their independent assessments (a free version available at https://www.lexico.com/).

They independently rated each word with yes/no as an answer to the question and had the option to provide an open-ended comment with their judgement. Their level of agreement was 97.5% (79/81). We excluded two words due to low specificity, as suggested by one of the experts (hyperconnected and non-linear). This was the only source of discrepancy between the experts’ assessments. The expert also commented on the redundancy of two words (they were already included in the dictionary within another word ending with an asterisk), although both experts marked them for inclusion. We decided not to use any data reduction techniques because we judged the nature of our construct to be associated with a smaller pool of more specific words. In such cases, further eliminating words could risk decreasing the dictionary’s chance of picking up the construct within the trip experiences, as previously described in the methodology of the dictionary development by Donohue, Liang, and Druckman (2014). Thus we finalised our dictionary list with N=77 words. Two of the authors (D. H. and I. B.) who had not participated in any of the previous steps reviewed the dictionary words and approved the final version.

The final list of dictionary words is shown in Table A.3.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.