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Imaginary companions, inner speech and auditory verbal hallucinations: What are the relations?

Fernyhough, C.; Watson, A.; Bernini, M.; Moseley, P; Alderson-Day, B.

Imaginary companions, inner speech and auditory verbal hallucinations: What are the relations? Thumbnail


Authors

A. Watson

P Moseley



Abstract

Interacting with imaginary companions (ICs) is now considered a natural part of childhood for many children, and has been associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes. Recent research has explored how the phenomenon of ICs in childhood and adulthood relates to the more unusual experience of hearing voices (or auditory verbal hallucinations; AVH). Specifically, parallels have been drawn between the varied phenomenology of the two kinds of experience, including the issues of quasi-perceptual vividness and autonomy/control. One line of research has explored how ICs might arise through the internalization of linguistically-mediated social exchanges to form dialogic inner speech. We present data from two studies on the relation between ICs in childhood and adulthood and the experience of inner speech. In the first, a large community sample of adults (N = 1472) completed online the new Varieties of Inner Speech–Revised (VISQ-R) questionnaire (Alderson-Day et al., 2018) on the phenomenology of inner speech, in addition to providing data on ICs and AVH. The results showed differences in inner speech phenomenology in individuals with a history of ICs, with higher scores on the Dialogic, Evaluative, and Other Voices subscales of the VISQ-R. In the second study, a smaller community sample of adults (N = 48) completed an auditory signal detection task as well as providing data on ICs and AVH. In addition to scoring higher on AVH proneness, individuals with a history of ICs showed reduced sensitivity to detecting speech in white noise as well as a bias towards detecting it. The latter finding mirrored a pattern previously found in both clinical and non-clinical individuals with AVH. These findings are consistent with the view that ICs represent a hallucination-like experience in childhood and adulthood which shows meaningful developmental relations with the experience of inner speech.

Citation

Fernyhough, C., Watson, A., Bernini, M., Moseley, P., & Alderson-Day, B. (2019). Imaginary companions, inner speech and auditory verbal hallucinations: What are the relations?. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 1665. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01665

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 2, 2019
Online Publication Date Jul 30, 2019
Publication Date Jul 30, 2019
Deposit Date Jul 9, 2019
Publicly Available Date Jul 30, 2019
Journal Frontiers in Psychology
Print ISSN 1664-1078
Electronic ISSN 1664-1078
Publisher Frontiers Media
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 10
Article Number 1665
DOI https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01665
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1298030
Publisher URL https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01665

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2019 Fernyhough, Watson, Bernini, Moseley and Alderson-Day. 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) and the copyright owner(s) 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.






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