Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Psychedelics and meditation are known for their potential to induce personally meaningful and even transformative experiences. However, it is unclear how similar these experiences are, or how they differ from each other. This explorative study used natural language processing (NLP) methods to compare reports of personally meaningful subjective experiences facilitated by either psychedelic substances or meditation. Participants (N = 197) wrote open-ended narrative reports about their most meaningful experience facilitated either with psychedelics (n = 134) or meditation (n = 63). These reports were analysed with text similarity analyses, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The semantic and lexical contents of the reports were highly similar and both groups expressed positive emotions on average. However, psychedelic experience reports were more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of positive and negative sentiments compared to more neutral meditation experiences. These results suggest that the two types of subjective experiences might be quite similar in general, but emotional intensity could be a distinguishing factor between them. Challenges with the NLP methods and the dataset limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. However, it offers new hypotheses and suggestions for future research on transformative experiences.
Source: Scientific Reports
Institutions: University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,690
OpenAlex ID: W4417360312