The Psychology of the Anomalous (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798295757273)

The Psychology of the Anomalous: Cognitive, Personality, and Socio-Cultural Dispositions Toward Paranormal Belief

For too long, belief in the paranormal has been pejoratively conceptualized as a catastrophic failure of reality testing or a deficit in critical thinking skills. What if, instead, the human inclination to embrace the supernatural is a profound and often adaptive manifestation of the brain's fundamental cognitive architecture?

The Psychology of the Anomalous delves into the science behind supernatural credence, revealing how evolutionary biases-mechanisms designed to ensure survival-are the psychological bedrock for pervasive global beliefs. This analysis dissects the role of:

• Apophenia and Pareidolia: The unprompted, pervasive tendency to perceive meaningful connections in random data and see familiar forms in ambiguous stimuli (such as faces in shadows).
• Hyperactive Agency Detection (HADD): The evolutionary bias to attribute intentionality and consciousness to inanimate or ambiguous environmental stimuli, which generates beliefs in unseen entities and poltergeists.
• Confirmation Bias: The mental shortcut that reinforces pre-existing belief systems, insulating them from empirical refutation.

Beyond cognition, this work rigorously explores how differences in personality traits dictate the intensity of anomalous experiences. Learn how high schizotypy, transliminality (a 'leaky' mental threshold), and fantasy proneness predispose individuals to profound phenomena, and how childhood trauma and dissociative coping mechanisms lead many to retreat into occult systems for psychological safety and control.

The book challenges traditional psychiatric models, arguing that paranormal belief, when isolated from severe psychopathology, is often a highly effective mechanism for generating existential meaning and emotional resilience in a chaotic world.

Finally, it addresses the central challenge for ethical investigators: how to differentiate between internally generated psychological events-such as Posttraumatic Psychosomatic Manifestations (PTPSM), or "Carrie Syndrome," (coined by paranormal investigator Dakota Frandsen) which externalize emotional stress as physical disturbance-and genuinely autonomous external anomalies.

By embracing an interdisciplinary framework, The Psychology of the Anomalous argues that the rigorous study of the unseen is a profound exploration of the mechanics, vulnerabilities, and enduring adaptive resilience of the human mind itself.