Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-w79xw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-20T17:20:16.857Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cognitive Vulnerability to Auditory Hallucination

Preferred Imagery Mode and Spatial Location of Sounds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Alfred B. Heilbrun Jr. ,
Nancy Blum  and
Marilyn Haas
Alfred B. Heilbrun Jr.
Affiliation:
The Psychological Center of the Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA
Nancy Blum
Affiliation:
The Psychological Center of the Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA
Marilyn Haas
Affiliation:
The Psychological Center of the Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Summary

Goldstone and Sarbin proposed that auditory hallucinations occur because imagery in a non-preferred sensory mode is more easily misinterpreted as having an external origin. This led to the hypothesis that auditory hallucinators would show less preference for auditory than for visual imagery. Our results suggest that this is true. We also compared the vividness of internally-generated auditory imagery with that of visual imagery, independently of preference, to see whether vividness was impaired in the non-preferred mode in hallucinators. The evidence suggested that this was not the case, but we did find a significantly deficient capacity for creating vivid images of either kind in process patients (i.e. those with poor premorbid status) compared with reactive (good premorbid) patients, regardless of any history of hallucinations. The withdrawal of external attention which characterizes process patients might also be expected to impair their ability to confirm or disconfirm the external origin of an auditory stimulus. We predicted therefore that process hallucinators would be particularly incompetent in spatial location of sounds: our experimental results confirmed this to be the case.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 143 , Issue 3 , September 1983 , pp. 294 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Angell, J. R. (1910) Methods for the determination of mental imagery. Psychology Monographs, 13, No. 53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arieti, S. (1955) Interpretation of Schizophrenia. New York: Brunner/Mazel.Google Scholar
Balogh, D. W., Schuck, J. R. & Leventhal, D. B. (1979) A study of schizophrenics' ability to localize the source of a sound. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 167, 484–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bender, G. H. (1970) The maturation process and hallucinations in children. In Origins and Mechanisms of Hallucinations (ed. Keup, W.). New York: Plenum.Google Scholar
Breuer, J. & Freud, S. (1895) Studies on Hysteria, Vol. 2.Google Scholar
Cameron, N. (1963) Personality Development and Psychopathology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
DeWolfe, A. S. (1974) Are there two kinds of thinking in process and reactive schizophrenics? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83, 285–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Evarts, E. V. (1962) Neurophysiological theory of hallucinations. In Hallucinations (ed. West, L. J.). New York: Grune and Stratton.Google Scholar
Feinberg, E. V. (1962) A comparison of the visual hallucinations in schizophrenia with those induced by mescaline and LSD-25. In Hallucinations (ed. West, L. J.). New York: Grune and Stratton.Google Scholar
Fernald, M. R. (1912) The diagnosis of mental imagery. Psychology Monographs, 14, No. 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freides, D. (1974) Human information processing and sensory modality: cross-modal functions in formation complexity, memory, and deficit. Psychological Bulletin, 31, 284–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldstone, S. (1962) Psychophysics, reality, and hallucinations. In Hallucinations (ed. West, L. J.). New York: Grune and Stratton.Google Scholar
Heilbrun, A. B. (1980) Impaired recognition of self-expressed thought in patients with auditory hallucinations. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89, 728–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Horowitz, M. M. (1975) Hallucinations: An information-processing approach. In Hallucinations: Behavior, Experience, and Theory (eds. Siegel, R. K. and West, L. V.). New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Isakower, O. (1939) On the exceptional position of the auditory sphere. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 20, 340–8.Google Scholar
Johnson, M. H. & Ries, H. A. (1967) Validation study of the self-report scale for process–reactive schizophrenics. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31, 321–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCreary, C. P. (1974) Comparison of measures of social competency in schizophrenics and the relation of social competency to socio-economic factors. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83, 124–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meichenbaum, D. H. (1969) Validational study of marital status and the self-report scale for process–reactive schizophrenia. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 33, 351–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norbert, N. H. (1971) An inquiry into the nature of hallucinations. Unpublished master's thesis, Emory University.Google Scholar
Norbert, N. H. (1973) A study of the relationship of imagery and scanning to hallucinatory behavior. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Emory University.Google Scholar
Payne, R. W. (1973) Cognitive abnormalities. In Handbook of Abnormal Psychology (ed. Eysenck, H. J.). London: Pitman.Google Scholar
Sarbin, T. R. (1967) The concept of hallucinations. Journal of Personality, 35, 359–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seitz, P. F. & Molholm, H. B. (1947) Relation of mental imagery to hallucinations. A.M.A. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 57, 469–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sherman, M. & Beverly, B. I. (1924) Hallucinations in children. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 19, 165–70.Google Scholar
Silverman, J. (1964) The problem of attention in research and theory in schizophrenia. Psychological Review, 71, 352–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spanos, N. P. & Stam, J. J. (1979) The elicitation of visual hallucinations via brief instructions in a normal sample. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 167, 488–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ullmann, L. P. & Giovannoni, J. M. (1964) The development of a self-report measure of the process–reactive continuum. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 138, 38–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Venables, P. H. (1964) Input dysfunction in schizophrenia. In Progress in Experimental Personality Research, Vol. 1. (ed. Maher, B. A.). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
West, L. J. (1962) Hallucinations. New York: Grune and Stratton.Google Scholar
Winer, B. J. (1962) Statistical Principles in Experimental Design. New York: McGraw-Hill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.