Measuring the subjective: revisiting the psychometric properties of three rating scales that assess the acute effects of hallucinogens.
Human psychopharmacology September 1, 2016 José Carlos Bouso, Eduardo José Pedrero-Pérez, Sam Gandy et al. 48 citations
Three widely used questionnaires for assessing the subjective effects of hallucinogens—the Hallucinogen Rating Scale (HRS), the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), and the Addiction Research Center Inventory (ARCI)—were administered to 158 subjects (100 men) after they took ayahuasca, a hallucinogen whose main active component is N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses showed that the results only sparsely matched the theoretical proposals of the original authors, possibly because previous studies did not always use psychometric methods appropriate to the data. The authors consider these findings preliminary, pending larger samples to confirm or reject the proposed structures.