ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Consciousness Research
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1661390
The veridical Near-Death Experience Scale (vNDE Scale): construction and a first validation with human and artificial raters
Provisionally accepted
Patrizio E Tressoldi1*
Bruce Greyson2
Jeffrey Long3Janice Miner Holden4
Jean-Pierre Jourdan5
Robert A. King6Suzanne Mays7Robert Mays7Titus Rivas8Natasha Tassell-Matamua9
Pim Van Lommel10
Marjorie Hines Woollacott11- 1Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
- 2Virginia College, Birmingham, United States
- 3Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, Georgetown, United States
- 4University of North Texas College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences, Denton, United States
- 5IANDS-France, Oraison, France
- 6NDE-OBE Research Project, CASA Grande, United States
- 7Independent Researcher, Chapel Hill, United States
- 8Athanasia Workgroup, Nijmegen, Netherlands
- 9Massey University, Aotearoa, New Zealand
- 10Rijnstate, Arnhem, Netherlands
- 11University of Oregon, Eugene, United States
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In this study, we describe the construction of the veridical Near-Death Experience Scale (vNDE Scale), a structured instrument for evaluating the evidential strength of perceptions reported during near-death experiences (NDEs), and its first validation by human and artificial raters. The construction was implemented using a typical Delphi Method. The first draft of the scale was evaluated by 13 experts in NDE, who were asked to suggest revisions and comments within a month for the first round and 20 days for the second round. A general consensus was achieved on the second round on eight criteria related to the timing of the investigation, the medical and physical conditions, the level of third-person verification, and the number, type, and quality of perceptions reported by the near-death experiencer, to be rated on a four-level Likert scale. The validation phase consisted of the application of the vNDE Scale to 17 cases of potentially veridical NDEs by 11 independent human raters and three artificial raters based on Large-Language Models. In 14 of the17 cases (82.3%), the overall agreement between human and artificial judges was over 75%, considering the two close levels of evidence strength, i.e. moderate plus strong, low plus very low, or vice-versa. The vNDE Scale is a practical tool for evaluating the evidential strength of perceptions reported by near-death experiencers.
Keywords: Near-Death Experiences, Veridical Perception, mind-brain relationship, Consciousness, Large language models, artificial intelligence
Received: 07 Jul 2025; Accepted: 22 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tressoldi, Greyson, Long, Holden, Jourdan, King, Mays, Mays, Rivas, Tassell-Matamua, Van Lommel and Woollacott. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Patrizio E Tressoldi, patrizio.tressoldi@unipd.it
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