Preferred Name
Chris Hill
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Fall 2017
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)
Department
Department of Graduate Psychology
Advisor(s)
Gregg Henriques
Craig N. Shealy
Kenneth Critchfield
Abstract
Given the current state of the literature and weaknesses of many previous prevalence studies, the primary purpose of this research study was to gather base-rate data of color-grapheme synesthesia in a general population sample. Over a period of seven months, 502 participants enrolled in the study on Mechanical Turk and completed the online Synesthesia Battery. The primary data collected was the participant’s score on the synesthesia test, whereby a score of a one or below is deemed by the battery to be indicative of someone with a color-grapheme synesthetic ability. Of the 502 participants, eight percent (0.082) of the population sampled had scores below one, the cutoff suggestive of synesthesia on the Synesthesia Battery. This is a much higher percentage of the population than previously reported by previous studies. Exploratory analyses of demographic variables revealed some significant findings for handedness and education, such that left-handed people may have a greater representation among synesthetes than right-handed people and participants meeting the one score cutoff suggestive of synesthesia were more likely to have a graduate education.
Recommended Citation
Hill, Christopher, "Color-grapheme synesthesia: A study of population prevalence" (2017). Dissertations, 2014-2019. 162.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/diss201019/162
