A study of Poles' psychedelic and non-psychedelic mystical experiences: Lingustic analysis

This repository contains a Jupyter Notebook that focuses on lingustic analysis of the descriptions of psychedelic and non-psychedelic mystical experiences.

Dataset

The dataset in sav format is openly available courtesy of Mendeley Data:

Owsiak, M. (2025). Dataset - Psychedelic and Non-Psychedelic Mystical Experiences in Polish Adults. https://doi.org/10.17632/bhkb7zmb9v.1

Tools used

Languages, frameworks and environments:

> Python
> Jupyter Notebook
> Markdown

Libraries and packages:

> NLTK
> wordcloud
> transformers
> scikit-learn
> SciPy
> NumPy
> pandas
> statsmodels
> Matplotlib
> PIL
> IPython

APIs and pre-trained models:

> DeepL REST API
> EmoRoBERTa by Hugging Face

Data analysis and visualization

Data wrangling and cleaning

Using plain Python along with pandas and NumPy predefined functions, the following steps were performed:

• Merging duplicated variables into consistent dataset
• Recoding questionnaires' scorings
• Calculating summed results
• Cleaning and preparing data for analysis

Data analysis

• Calculating word frequency distribution using NLTK for tokenization and wordcloud for stopwords.
• Conducting series of correlation analysis using CountVectorizer from scikit-learn and pearsonr function from SciPy.
• Performing emotional sentiment NLP analysis using EmoRoBERTa pre-trained model from transformers library.

Data visualization

The results of the study were visualized as bar plots employing Matplotlib library and as word clouds using wordcloud library.

Results and conclusions

The analysis revealed that descriptions of complete mystical experiences often emphasize positive emotions and existential themes, such as love and cosmic concepts, while negative emotions and factual terms are more associated with less intense experiences. Significant differences were noted in the frequency of specific emotions like admiration and fear between the two groups, with complete experiences showing more positivity and less negativity. Overall, the findings highlight how language reflects the intensity and nature of mystical experiences, with positive emotional and existential themes prevalent in more profound experiences.

Authorship

The original research was performed and presented repository was created by Michał Owsiak. The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this repository.