The assessment of dissociative experiences in a non-clinical population: reliability, validity, and factor structure of the Dissociative Experiences Scale

Two studies were conducted to examine the meaning of scores on the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES; Bernstein & Putnam, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 174, 727–735, 1986) for non-clinical populations. Subjects in both studies completed the DES and several other measures of personality. In addition, subjects in study 1 also indicated how easily and clearly they could imagine experiencing various emotions, and then were given a surprise memory test for the emotion words. The results provide some support for the construct validity of the DES: subjects scoring high on the DES more easily and clearly imagined the experience of threatening emotions, but then demonstrated a memory deficit for the emotion words. In addition, DES scores were positively correlated with anxiety and neuroticism, which suggests that dissociators are fundamentally different from repressors. Finally, the factor analytic results indicate that the DES is assessing a single dimension of dissociation.