Exploring the relationship between microdosing, personality and emotional insight: A prospective study

Introduction

Microdosing — the regular ingestion of sub-perceptual doses of classic psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin — has become culturally prominent amid claims of benefits to mood, creativity and performance. Biological action of these substances partly involves agonism at 5-HT2A receptors, while typical microdose ranges are described as roughly 1/20 to 1/10 of a recreational dose and are intended to avoid perceptual alterations. Empirical research to date is limited and mixed: some controlled studies report subtle acute effects or dose-thresholds for subjective effects, while naturalistic and prospective studies have found improvements in self-reported wellbeing but also increases in negative emotion or trait neuroticism in some samples. Personality traits and emotional awareness (alexithymia) have not been conclusively characterised in relation to microdosing, and existing prospective work has yielded inconsistent findings. Dressler and colleagues set out to examine whether a short course of naturalistic microdosing is associated with changes in five-factor personality traits and with emotional insight. The study posed four explicit research questions: whether microdosing leads to changes in self-reported personality traits; whether prior microdosing experience relates to personality; whether alexithymia and neuroticism are associated among people who microdose; and whether baseline alexithymia predicts subsequent increases in neuroticism. The investigators emphasised a prospective within-subject design with a minimum 31-day interval between assessments to capture short-term changes while permitting multiple dosing sessions between time points.