Validation of the Portuguese version of the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences and characterization of psychotic experiences in a Brazilian sample

Objective: We investigated: i) the reliability and validity of a Brazilian version of the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (CAPE), developed to detect and characterize psychotic experiences in the general population; and ii) the association between psychotic experiences, childhood adversity, and cannabis use in a population-based sample. Methods: We performed factorial analyses and generalized linear models with CAPE scores as the dependent variable in a sample composed of 217 first-episode psychosis patients, 104 unaffected biological siblings, and 319 non-psychotic population-based participants. Results: After removing seven items from its positive dimension and two items from its negative dimension, a 33-item Brazilian version of the CAPE showed acceptable adjustment indices (confirmatory fit index = 0.895; goodness of fit index = 0.822; parsimony goodness of fit index = 0.761; root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = 0.055, p [RMSEA p 0.05] = 0.04) and internal consistency in all its dimensions (4 0.70). Childhood adversity was associated with higher scores in all three dimensions, as well as with total score. Lifetime cannabis use was associated with higher scores only in the positive dimension. Conclusion: The proposed Brazilian version of the CAPE corroborates the tridimensional approach for assessing psychosis-proneness, and the frequency and severity of psychotic manifestations are distributed as a spectrum in the general population.This research received financial support from the Fundação de Amparo á Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP; 2012/05178-0). TCCR received a grant from CNPq (process 162125/2014-3). RS (process 2013/11167- 3), FC-Z (process 2019/13229-2), and DLR (process 2018/07581-2) received grants from FAPESP. JS and JM are supported by Infraestrutura Nacional de Computação Distribuída (INCD), funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) and Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER; project 22153-01/ SAICT/2016). PRM and CMD-B received productivity grants from the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq; 307492/2014-1 and 303815/2015-9, respectively).