Differential effects of personality traits related to the P-ImpUSS dimension on latent inhibition in healthy female subjects

An experiment was performed to investigate the effects of various personality traits (psychoticism, impulsiveness, sensation seeking) with substantial loadings on the P-ImpUSS dimension on latent inhibition (LI). LI refers to the finding that performance on a learning task is poorer for a preexposed irrelevant stimulus than for a novel stimulus. Forty-eight female subjects were tested by a rule-learning task that has been shown to reliably produce differential LI effects in low and high psychosis-prone normals. Results suggest that, besides psychoticism, the sensation seeking subfactor disinhibition is negatively associated with LI. Furthermore, stepwise regression analysis revealed that combining individual psychoticism and disinhibition scores results in a significant increase in explained variance of LI. These findings are discussed in terms of a relationship between distinct P-ImpUSS-related aspects of personality and LI.