A Rasch analysis of the Greyson Near-Death Experience (NDE) Scale shows that it measures a single, interval-level dimension in people reporting true NDEs. As NDE intensity increases, the experiences progress from peace and joy to mystical insights, and finally to awareness of events in other places or times. This pattern is consistent regardless of gender, age, or when the NDE occurred. True NDEs differ qualitatively and quantitatively from other groups' responses, particularly in the emphasis on paranormal or mystical elements. The findings suggest that some people may misinterpret other psychological states as NDEs, and that religious background may influence how these experiences are reported.
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have a consistent structure that appears in both standardized scales and people's own verbal accounts. Analyzing a large dataset of NDE narratives with latent semantic analysis, researchers found that accounts from people who scored above the median on Greyson's NDE Scale contained seven distinct linguistic clusters. Four of these clusters involved transcendent or paranormal themes, while three focused on physiological or environmental details. The results confirm that the intensity of an NDE correlates with the content of the verbal report, supporting the concurrent validity of Greyson's NDE Scale. This approach demonstrates how computational text analysis can reveal structure in qualitative data relevant to consciousness studies.
Anomalous events resembling trickster behavior—such as missing files, device malfunctions, unusual dreams, and emotional shifts—were reported by researchers writing about ghostly episodes. In a sample of 167 participants (7 credentialed frontier scientists and 160 amateur paranormal investigators), subjective experiences occurred 1.6 times more often than objective events, with endorsement rates from 7% to 30%. Rasch analysis showed a unidimensional hierarchy of 14 coherent items with strong internal consistency (KR-20 = .87) and minimal gender bias. While psychological mechanisms like memory reconstruction or cognitive load may explain many anomalies, their clustering and symbolic framing suggest deeper epistemological vulnerabilities, termed a “trickster chain,” in paranormal-themed writing. The findings may extend to other emotionally charged or liminal writing contexts.
Two scales measuring the phenomenology of near-death experiences—the 16-item NDE Scale and the 20-item NDE-C—were compared in 705 self-identified experiencers. The scales correlate nearly perfectly (r = 0.98), indicating they measure the same underlying construct. However, Rasch analysis revealed problems with the NDE-C's category structure and five novel items. The original NDE Scale's item hierarchy replicated across samples, showing long-term stability. Based on parsimony and psychometric evidence, the original NDE Scale with Rasch scoring and a validated cut-off of 7 (out of 32) is recommended for future research.