The relationship between transliminality and boundary structure subscales.

Abstract

An opportunity sample of 98, mostly undergraduate [1], participants completed Thalbourne's Transliminality Scale (Form B) [2-3] plus three subscales from Hartmann's Boundary Structure Questionnaire [4] (sleep/wake/dream, unusual experiences, thoughts/feelings/moods) plus a psychic experiences scale which included some of Hartmann's items' The results support the hypothesis, and Houran et al.'s [5] findings, that there is a significant positive correlation between selected boundary structure subscales and a measure of transliminality (range r: .384-.615). Our results are similar to Houran et al.'s in that only certain subscales were significant predictors of transliminality when the effects of others are taken into account. In this study only the psychic experiences scale, which is not one of Hartmann's original subscales [4, 6], was a significant predictor when the effects of the three other subscales were accounted for. The theories behind the concepts of boundary structure and transliminality suggest that individuals differ according to the extent to which different areas of the brain/mind are separated.