25 adolescents showing a Psychotic-spectrum Disorder were compared with 24 adolescents showing Conduct Disorder on a task eliciting reasons for attributing life to an ambiguous pictorial stimulus (dough on a beach). Consistent with expectations from earlier research, the psychotic adolescents showed greater modes of animistic thinking (attributions of life to nonlife forms) than conduct-disordered youth, associated with theorized merging between self and the nonhuman environment. Implications are discussed.
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