Pilar Torrecilla
Transcript
Hello everyone, my name is Pilar Torrecilla and I am honored to present this talk as an early career awardee at the 2025 SIRS conference about predictive validity of psychotic like experiences in daily life 8 years later.
Imagine being able to track the earliest signs of psychosis as they unfold in real-time, in everyday life. Psychosis is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon; it exists on a continuum, from subtle and transient psychotic-like experiences to full-blown psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia. But how do we measure this dynamic process as it happens?
Our research employs Experience Sampling Methodology (or ESM)— ESM is a real-time assessment technique that prompts individuals to report their symptoms and experiences throughout the day. Unlike traditional assessments, ESM minimizes retrospective bias and allows an in-depth look at risk and resilience factors in real time and in real life, thus enhancing ecological validity.
In our study, the Barcelona Longitudinal Investigation of Schizotypy (BLISS) study, we tracked college students for nearly eight years. We found that positive and negative schizotypy traits measured at time 1 were associated with psychotic manifestations in daily life 8 years later but also, that psychotic manifestations in daily life measured at time 2, predicted the presence of similar manifestations 6 years later. Finally, we found that some of these associations were moderated by high genetic susceptibility related to psychosis proneness.
These findings validate the assessment of psychotic experiences in daily life and support the relevance of integrating ESM into research and clinical practice to a) improve early detection of psychosis risk, b) to develop personalized interventions and c) even to help us to further understand the influence of genetic susceptibility and environmental factors in psychosis.
If you are interested in this research and would like to know more about it, please join us at the ‘At risk population and risk predictions’ oral session on Monday at 3.45pm.
Thank you so much.
