Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), which refer to experiences that resemble the positive symptoms of psychosis (such as delusion or hallucination), are below the level of clinical diagnosis (Kelleher and Cannon, 2010). PLEs are relatively common in youth (McClellan, 2018), with a median prevalence of 7.5 % in adolescents aged 13–18 (Kelleher et al., 2012a), and a peaking incidence in late adolescence (Sullivan et al., 2020). PLEs have been associated with a high risk of developing later psychotic disorders (Kaymaz et al., 2012; Linscott and van Os, 2012), which was initially proposed by Van Os et al. (van Os et al., 2000; van Os et al., 2008).

Growing evidence shows that there exists a link between PLEs and non-psychotic disorders. A recent systematic review covering five cross-sectional and three longitudinal studies indicated that children and adolescents with PLEs had 2.82-fold increased odds of developing non-psychotic disorders compared with their counterparts. Particularly, those with PLEs had a 3.83-fold increased risk of developing affective disorders compared with those with not (Healy et al., 2019). Hence, on the basis of associations between PLEs and non-psychotic disorders, we hypothesized that PLEs may act also as a co-occurring psychopathological indicator, which was shared by several common mental disorders during a pluripotent period before the appearance of a specific symptom or disease (Kotov et al., 2018; Hartmann et al., 2021).

Previous studies may initially indicate links between PLEs and affective symptoms, however, there are several limitations. First, little is known about PLEs as an relevant indicator of multi-dimensional affective symptoms because most studies focused on only one or two symptoms (Varghese et al., 2009; Wu et al., 2021). Second, PLEs can be subdivided into different subtypes. Heterogeneity among different dimensions (Yung et al., 2009) may be associated with different types of affective symptoms respectively. Much is still unknown about the further relationship between different subtypes of PLEs and different types of affective symptoms (Gong et al., 2022).

To address the above issues, we conducted an online survey among college students and examined the relationship between PLEs and multiple affective symptoms in the school-based population. For further understanding of the relationship between different subtypes of PLEs and affective symptoms, a network analysis was conducted to explore the core symptoms and to evaluate the relationship between different subtypes of PLEs and different types of affective symptoms.

Thus, the aims of this study are as follows:

To investigate the association between PLEs and multi-dimensional affective symptoms, including depressive, anxiety, and manic symptoms in a large sample of college students.

To further examine the relationship between different subtypes of PLEs and affective symptoms.