Dissociation & Maladaptive Daydreaming in Neurodivergent Adults

Participant Research Consent Form

Researchers:

Dr. Larissa Panetta (lpanetta@yorku.ca) & Dr. Jonathan Weiss (jonweiss@yorku.ca), Principal Investigators

Behavioural Science Building, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Purpose of the Research:

You are being asked to participate in a project that looks at the dissociative and maladaptive daydreaming experiences of neurodivergent adults. We want to measure your dissociative experiences, including experiences with maladaptive daydreaming, using multiple choice questionnaires.

Dissociative Experiences have been described as experiences of loss of information or control over mental processes that, under normal circumstances, are available to conscious awareness, self-attribution, or control (Cardena & Carlson, 2011).
Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) has been described as an elaborate, compulsive immersion in intense fanciful fantasy characterised by intricate set-ups, frequently supplemented by exposure to evocative music and repetitive movements such as pacing, gesturing and mouthing (Somer et al., 2025).

We also want to use multiple choice questionnaires to measure traits commonly associated with ADHD and autism, including repetitive motor movements, emotion regulation, and emotional identification.

The results of this study will be shared through publications in peer-reviewed academic journals.

Participation:

If you consent to this research, you will be asked to complete some multiple choice questionnaires on the following pages. You can continue to the next set of questions by clicking the arrow at the bottom of the page.

You can exit the survey when you are finished, or at any other point, by closing the browser or leaving the page. You may also save your progress and return later.

The questionnaires are estimated to take between 20-40 minutes.

Voluntary Participation and Withdrawal:

Your participation in the study is completely voluntary and you may choose to stop participating at any time. Your decision not to volunteer, to stop participating, or to refuse to answer particular questions will not influence the nature of the ongoing relationship you may have with the researchers, study staff, or with York University either now, or in the future.

To stop participating, simply exit the surveys by closing your browser or navigating to any other website. Your responses up until the point of withdrawal will still be saved.

Should you wish to withdraw after the study, you will have the option to also withdraw your data up until the analysis is complete.

Risks and Discomforts:

Risks associated with completing questionnaires about your personal qualities, emotions, or mental health may include fatigue or feeling negative emotions.

Benefits:

You may derive feelings of personal satisfaction and connectedness by contributing to research that has been designed to increase our understanding of and inform treatments for mental health experiences that are typically more difficult to find information about (e.g., dissociation and maladaptive daydreaming).

Confidentiality:

The information you share will be combined with other participants’ information, and you will never be identified in any way when the results of this study are published.

The data collected in this research project may be used – in an anonymized form - in subsequent research investigations exploring similar lines of inquiry. Such projects will still undergo ethics review by the HPRC, our institutional REB. Any secondary use of anonymized data by the research team will be treated with the same degree of confidentiality and anonymity as in the original research project.

After our study is published, anonymous data will be housed in the Canadian open data portal Borealis (https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info). Borealis supports the creation of custom terms of use and restrictions in order to control access to research data. Borealis facilitates long-term access, persistent identifiers, and preservation by storing a backup copy for safekeeping. Borealis is hosted completely on Canadian servers at the University of Toronto Libraries. This will help researchers to verify our findings and uncover new discoveries. The data included in this data repository will not contain any information that can identify you.

The researcher(s) acknowledge that the host of the online survey (i.e., QuestionPro) may automatically collect participant data without their knowledge (i.e., IP addresses). Although this information may be provided or made accessible to the researchers, it will not be used or saved without consent on the researcher’s system. Further, because this project employs e-based collection techniques, data may be subject to access by third parties as a result of various security legislation now in place in many countries and thus the confidentiality and privacy of data cannot be guaranteed during web-based transmission. However, our online questionnaire and program host (QuestionPro) uses many sophisticated safety features and runs many tests to ensure high security at all times. Additionally, all of the data collected from QuestionPro is processed and stored in a specific location and will not be moved. Thus, because the data is being collected in Canada, it will be processed and stored in Canada. You can learn more about QuestionPro safety features at https://www.questionpro.com/security.

Questions?

If you have questions about the research in general or about your role in the study, please contact Dr. Larissa Panetta (lpanetta@yorku.ca). This research has received ethics review and approval by the Human Participants Review Sub-Committee, York University’s Ethics Review Board and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri-Council Research Ethics guidelines (REB# 2026-e003).

If you have any questions about this process, or about your rights as a participant in the study, please contact the Manager, Research Ethics in the Office of Research Ethics, York University (e-mail ore@yorku.ca).This office oversees the ethical conduct of research studies and is not part of the study team. Everything that you discuss will be kept confidential.

Please answer the following questions

Custom Title