Current perspectives on the mechanisms of auditory hallucinations: introduction to the special research topic

Kelly Diederen,Johanna C Badcock,Frank Larøi,Paul Allen

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00792

Abstract

Current perspectives on the mechanisms of auditory hallucinations: introduction to the special research topic

Highlights

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term “perspective” is derived from the verb perspicere, meaning “looked at closely.” In keeping with this origin, the contributors to this Frontiers Research Topic have looked closely at the experience of auditory hallucinations (AH), providing new insights into the precise nature of hallucinations in clinical and non-clinical groups; the underlying cognitive, emotional and neural processes; and how this evidence might inform the generation of personalized treatments Connor and Birchwood (2013)
McCarthy-Jones et al (2013) call for more nuanced descriptions of AH that reflect more accurately what the experience is like, and proffer a philosophical phenomenological perspective, which encourages a systematic exploration of experiences from the first person perspective. Both Badcock and Chhabra (2013) and deLeedeSmith and Barkus (2013) tackle the diverse presentations of AH in clinical and non-clinical groups. deLeede-Smith and Barkus adopt a developmental perspective, charting how the features of AH emerge and persist across the lifespan, and suggest that mechanisms maintaining AH differ across these populations, whilst Badcock and Chhabra (2013) provide an extensive and reflective review of the literature on the perception of voice identity, which points to subtle biases across different levels of voice identity
While both groups exhibited decreased activation in regions related to self-other distinction when imagining a close friend performing an action, individuals with a genetic risk for schizophrenia displayed additional decreased activations in areas associated with visual imagery, episodic memory and social cognition when “” seeing a cue that said either “you” or “best friend” earlier on in the task

Summary

Introduction

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed. com) the term “perspective” is derived from the verb perspicere (from per- “through” + specere “to look”), meaning “looked at closely.” In keeping with this origin, the contributors to this Frontiers Research Topic have looked closely at the experience of auditory hallucinations (AH), providing new insights into the precise nature of hallucinations in clinical and non-clinical groups; the underlying cognitive, emotional and neural processes; and how this evidence might inform the generation of personalized treatments Connor and Birchwood (2013). DeLeede-Smith and Barkus adopt a developmental perspective, charting how the features of AH emerge and persist across the lifespan, and suggest that mechanisms maintaining AH differ across these populations, whilst Badcock and Chhabra (2013) provide an extensive and reflective review of the literature on the perception of voice identity, which points to subtle biases across different levels of voice identity.

Results

Conclusion