Comparative Study of Positive and Negative Symptoms of Schizotypy and Schizotypal Character Dimensions among Male and Female Students

The goal of this paper is comparison of positive and negative symptoms of schizotypy and schizotypal character aspects among boy and girl stu-dents. For this purpose, 150 female and 150 male students in University of Tabriz were selected using random cluster sampling. Schizotypal character questionnaire (Raine, 1991) was conducted. Descriptive statis-tic indexes and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used for data analysis. Findings indicated that there is significant difference in schizotypal character general index between boys and girls (P < 0.05). In addition, meaningful difference was observed between boys and girls in subjects such as schizotypal negative symptoms and dimensions of unu-sual conceptual experiences, limited emotion, lack of close friends, and strange speech (P < 0.05). In contrast, there was no considerable differ-ence between them in schizotypal positive symptoms and magical thought dimensions, turning thought, suspicion or mistrust, extreme so-cial anxiety, and strange behavior (P>0.05). Totally, the results showed that male students experience more and intense non-clinical symptoms in schizotypal character general index and schizotypy negative symptoms in comparison to female ones, representing having the readiness for catch-ing psychosis disorders.