100 responses to the Salamanca cluster headache test

The Salamanca personality screening test was originally shared here as a curiosity piece: an old cluster headache question, a short questionnaire from a 2016 paper, and a chance to see whether a community sample would produce a similar shape. Now that 100 people have completed it, the comparison is interesting enough to publish as a small follow-up.

A quick note on limits

This is not formal research or a diagnostic exercise. The Salamanca questionnaire is a brief screening tool: 22 statements that flag possible trait patterns. It cannot tell whether an answer reflects lifelong personality, pain behaviour, trauma, sleep disruption, being in cycle, or ordinary context.

So the right question is narrow: when a self-selected cluster headache community sample took the same screening-style test used in the published paper, what pattern appeared?

What the first 100 responses showed

As of this snapshot on 15 July 2026, the page had collected 100 responses. Ninety-four people selected cluster headache, 55 selected episodic cluster headache, 34 selected chronic cluster headache, one selected migraine, four selected another or no headache disorder, and one preferred not to say.

Among the 94 cluster headache responses, the most commonly elevated traits were paranoid, schizoid, anancastic or obsessive, emotionally unstable borderline, histrionic, anxious, and impulsive. The chart below compares this pool with the highlighted cluster headache results in Muñoz et al. (2016), where the published paper had 80 cluster headache patients.

The broad overlap is interesting. Anancastic, anxious, histrionic, schizoid, impulsive, and paranoid traits all appeared prominently here, as they did in the 2016 paper. The biggest difference was paranoid traits, which were much higher in this community pool.

The sample is self-selected and online, so it should not be treated like a prevalence estimate. But the pattern is still useful as a community snapshot: not proof of a "cluster personality", but not nothing either.

What the trait names mean

The words can sound harsher than they are. In this context they are trait labels from a screening questionnaire, not diagnoses. A high score means the answers leaned toward that pattern on two items.

With cluster headache, some of these answers may reflect the condition as much as the person: isolation during attacks, broken sleep, years of being misunderstood, or the psychological force of pain that arrives without permission. That is why the result is best read as a reflection point, not a label.

So was it worth doing?

I think yes. It cannot diagnose anyone or separate personality from coping, but it can show that this community, when asked the same questions used in the paper, produced a pattern that does not simply vanish.

That does not settle the question. It just keeps the question alive, and maybe moves it to a better place: away from stereotypes, and toward careful discussion of how cluster headache, temperament, pain behaviour, trauma, biology, and coping might intersect.

That was the point of sharing it in the first place. Not to label people. Not to make anyone feel reduced. Just to look at an old idea with the community in the room.