Examining Psychedelic-Induced Changes in Social Functioning and Connectedness in a Naturalistic Online Sample Using the Five-Factor Model of Personality

CONCLUSION

Meaningful prosocial changes were observed across a number of outcomes relevant to social functioning. Overall, participants reported decreases in critical and quarrelsome demeanor and anxiety and mood lability, and increases in perceived social connectedness. Preliminary evidence was additionally found for increases in cognitive empathy, but only among participants initially low in this trait. Adaptive changes in neuroticism and perceived social connectedness also showed signs of being amplified among participants starting with less adaptive initial levels of these traits. We expand upon these findings within the context of four main questions: (a) Is psychedelic use related to changes in personality traits relevant to social functioning? (b) Is psychedelic use related to change in perceptions of social connectedness? (c) Is change in personality connected to change in perceived social connectedness? and (d) Are there factors that predispose or potentiate change in social functioning-related traits and perceived social connectedness? Is Psychedelic Use Related to Changes in Personality Traits Relevant to Social Functioning? Two personality domains with strong relevance to social functioning (neuroticism, agreeableness) displayed substantive, small-sized, changes in the direction of enhanced social functioning. First, agreeableness was measured using four outcomes including TIPI Critical Quarrelsome, TIPI Sympathetic Warm, compassion, and empathic concern. TIPI Critical Quarrelsome was the only outcome to decline substantively between baseline measurement and 2 weeks following psychedelic experience and remain substantively below baseline scores 4 weeks following use. Although limited internal reliability for this single-item outcome qualifies interpretation, this result is suggestive of components of agreeableness that are particularly susceptible to psychedelic change processes. According to the Big Five Aspects model, a datadriven model of personality, each FFM domain can be divided into two distinct, but interrelated, components that hold superior parsimony relative to FFM facets, and greater granularity relative to broad FFM domains. For agreeableness, these components represent aspects Compassion (versus Callousness) and Politeness (versus Belligerence). Notably, TIPI Critical Quarrelsome is the only measured outcome that, based on rational analysis, conceptually captures the Politeness aspect of agreeableness, whereas the other agreeableness outcomes capture the Compassion aspect. At its low pole, Politeness, like the TIPI Critical Quarrelsome item, describes an antagonistic and conflictprone style of interpersonal relating that seeks to express judgment, demonstrate superiority, and gain advantage. Our results are the first in the literature to suggest a specific decrease in criticism and quarrelsomeness following psychedelic experience. Should psychedelic experience be most targeted to personality functioning in Politeness, it bears noting the clinical and forensic implications of this finding. Politeness, relative to Compassion, bears strongest relations with pathological personality traits most relevant to antagonistic personality disorders (e.g., Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder) including attention seeking, grandiosity, manipulativeness, deceitfulness, and hostility (e.g.,. As such, in this data, psychedelic use shows some signs of therapeutic potential for the treatment of personality disorders. Our data appears consistent with three studies that have shown qualified support for prospective increases in agreeableness, as well as work showing decreased levels of supervision failure among individuals involved in the justice system and intimate partner violence in the general population. No other agreeableness outcomes exhibited meaningful change. One explanation for these results relates to restriction of range in these outcomes versus TIPI Critical Quarrelsome, such that participants in our sample tended to exhibit already aboveaverage standing on TIPI Sympathetic Warm, compassion, and empathic concern, and thus may have possessed less potential for upward change in these traits (see Supplementary Figurefor baseline density plots). Moderation analyses were accordingly conducted to examine whether participants with lower scores on these traits were more likely to exhibit significant upward change. No credible moderation was observed. Power analyses were additionally conducted to evaluate our capacity to form conclusions from these null results, namely that TIPI Sympathetic Warm, compassion, and empathic concern do not meaningfully respond to naturalistic psychedelic use. The results of our power analyses were suggestive that we were adequately powered to detect an interaction effect of small size (b < 0.20) for compassion and empathic concern if one was present. As such, our data provide preliminary support for the absence of meaningful longer-term change in compassion and empathic concern in the general population of psychedelic users. Furthermore, our null results with respect to adaptive change in affective empathy (indexed by IRI Empathic Concern) are convergent with previous evidence that explicit emotional empathy (a related construct) does not remain enhanced for longer than 1 week following psychedelic administration. 6 It is notable that acute increases in explicit emotional empathy have been observed in three previous studies using the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET;. This raises the possibility that enhancements in affective empathy and compassion may be time-limited without additional maintenance practices. Finally, perspective taking, a related construct capturing cognitive empathy (i.e., ability to occupy mental perspectives of others; IRI Perspective Taking), did show some signs of increasing in relation to psychedelic use for a subset of our sample. Although a main effect change in perspective taking was not observed, participants one standard deviation below the mean in baseline perspective taking exhibited substantive change in this trait. Although the measure we used involved subjective self-appraisal, our results provide preliminary evidence that psychedelic use may provide longer-term enhancements to cognitive empathy among individuals with low initial capacity. Of note, however,did not observe enhanced cognitive empathy 7 days post-psychedelic experience while using the MET cognitive task. We encourage researchers to examine whether a similar subset of individuals with low 6 As a note, results from the present study are not directly commensurable withfinding at 7 days as cognitive and affective empathy was measured using a laboratory test (Multifaceted Empathy Test) that elicits empathic ability rather than relying on participants' self-appraisal of empathic ability. standing on cognitive empathy exhibit substantive post-acute enhancements in objective task performance. Collectively, this pattern of results may be suggestive that psychedelic experience in the general population is more likely to drive adaptive changes in Politeness versus Compassion. On a methodological level, the pattern raises the possibility that mixed findings within the literature may owe in part to imprecise measurement of agreeableness. Future research is accordingly called for that examines psychedelic-induced personality change using granular measurement sufficient to detecting possible differential effects on aspects (or facets) of personality. Second, perhaps strongest support was found for adaptive change in neuroticism, with data showing small-sized, but substantive decreases in anxiety and mood lability (TIPI Anxious Easily upset) that remained significantly above baseline scores 4 weeks following psychedelic use. Our results are consistent with a number of previous prospective studies showing psychedelic-induced reductions in neuroticismincluding one study demonstrating change relative to a control groupand a naturalistic study showing change in self-and informant-report data. Three randomized and controlled clinical trialsalso provide support for a psychedelic-induced antidepressant effect, which bears relevance to our present examination of neuroticism in view of common structure between personality and psychopathology (e.g.,. Of note, the size of the observed effects are somewhat smaller than medium-sized effects found in other studies (e.g.,. As such, recreational use outside of therapeutic contexts designed to support introspective inquiry (e.g., psychedelic-assisted therapy, ayahuasca ceremony) may attend smaller effect size changes. Increased emotional stability (TIPI Calm Emotionally stable) was only observed between baseline and 2 weeks, and thus will not be interpreted. Similarly, because changes in TIPI extraversion did not extend to 4 weeks, and its counterpart item, TIPI Reserved, showed no change, this result is not interpreted. Collectively, our results indicate that psychedelic use may promote personality traits of high relevance to social functioning, namely traits linked to lower reactivity and antagonism in interpersonal communication, relationship stability, and emotion regulation. Results involving decreased neuroticism may be consistent with recent neurocognitive work demonstrating reduced negative affect (and amygdala response) in relation to facial stimuli 1 week following psilocybin use, and decreased trait anxiety and increased positive affect 1 month following psilocybin use. To evaluate the size of these personality change effects relative to alternative interventions, we additionally compared observed effect size changes in TIPI Anxious and TIPI Critical to meta-analyzed effects of psycho-and pharmacotherapeutic intervention. In their large meta-analysis (k = 199; N = ~20,000),) meta-analysis likely included a small proportion of studies targeting agreeableness specifically, potentially suppressing their observed effect size for agreeableness, and making our effect size estimates appear artifactually favorable. Although speculative, it may be additionally useful to explore the degree to which the trajectories of change in personality found in this study relate to each other. Covariance of change over time may be diagnostic of common psychedelic-induced processes that underlie multiple traits. To accomplish this goal, we conducted analyses examining correlations of change scores in those traits that exhibited significant change in our study (Table). Notably, TIPI Anxious exhibited a medium-sized correlation with TIPI Critical. 8 Such intraindividual covariation of neuroticism and agreeableness following psychedelic experience may point to lower critical and quarrelsome disposition under psychological conditions of reduced negative emotionality. This relation may also point to common causes involving enhanced emotion regulation ability (e.g., regulation of distress and frustration). Few studies have explored these possibilities in particular. Nevertheless, one previous study showed that men with a history of psychedelic use reported better emotion regulation ability and lower intimate partner violence, and that emotion regulation ability cross-sectionally mediated the relation between psychedelic use and intimate partner violence. Applied to our own work, it is conceivable that reduced neuroticism via enhanced emotion regulation accompanies lower stress reactivity and interpersonal aggression, as indexed by our TIPI Critical Quarrelsome item. It will be important for future prospective work to explore how psychedelic use may mechanistically impact BFAS Belligerence (low pole of Politeness) and externalizing behavior, possibly through enhanced emotion regulation, meaning, and fulfillment, and reduced negative emotionality and anger reactivity.