Psychosis proneness, loneliness, and hallucinations in nonclinical individuals

Hallucinations occur along a continuum of normal functioning. Investigating the factors related to this experience in nonclinical individuals may offer important information for understanding the etiology of hallucinations in psychiatric populations. In this study we test the relationship between psychosis proneness, loneliness, and auditory hallucinations in a nonclinical sample using the White Christmas paradigm. Seventy-six undergraduate students participated in this study. We found that slightly more than half of our participants endorsed a hallucinatory experience during the White Christmas paradigm. However, we did not observe a relationship between the number of hallucinatory experiences and schizotypy, propensity to hallucinate, or loneliness. Moreover, there were no differences on these measures between individuals who reported hearing a hallucination during the White Christmas paradigm relative to those who did not. Thus, there may be other contextual factors not investigated in this study that might clarify the mechanism by which auditory hallucinations are experienced in a nonclinical population.

Modality-general and modality-specific processes in hallucinations

There is a growing recognition in psychosis research of the importance of hallucinations in modalities other than the auditory. This has focused attention on cognitive and neural processes that might be shared by, and which might contribute distinctly to, hallucinations in different modalities. In this article, I address some issues around the modality-generality of cognitive and neural processes in hallucinations, including the role of perceptual and reality-monitoring systems, top-down and bottom-up processes in relation to the psychological and neural substrates of hallucinations, and the phenomenon of simultaneous multimodal hallucinations of the same entity. I suggest that a functional systems approach, inspired by some neglected aspects of the writings of A. R. Luria, can help us to understand patterns of hallucinatory experience across modalities and across clinical and non-clinical groups. Understanding the interplay between modality-general and modality-specific processes may bear fruit for improved diagnosis and therapeutic approaches to dealing with distressing hallucinations.

Disjunctivism

The disjunctivist claims that the mental states involved in a case of successful – "veridical" – perception of an object differ from those involved in a hallucinatory experience of such an object, even in those cases in which the two experiences are indiscriminable for their subject. Among its supporters, there tend to be two main motivations for endorsing disjunctivism: because it is necessary if we are to hold that, in cases of successful perception, worldly objects and properties are literally constituents of our experiences, and because it offers us a way of responding to the challenge of skepticism. Among other things, its opponents argue that it is inconsistent with both empirical findings in, and the underlying commitments of, the psychology of vision, and challenge the disjunctivist to provide explanations of hallucination and illusion that explain how such states can be indiscriminable from veridical perceptions without positing some common factor – such as a common conscious / experiential core – that is shared by the different cases.

The ‘report of a nightmare’: hallucinating conflict in the political and personal frontiers of Ulster during the IRA border campaign of 1920–22

The influence of the ‘new psychology’ was less notable in early-twentieth-century Ireland than elsewhere. Nonetheless, the personal narratives of patients can be used to unravel the meaning of warfare and conflict. This chapter exploits a 1940 article published by the former medical superintendent of the Downpatrick District Asylum, Michael J. Nolan, of a ‘case of acute systematized hallucinosis’. His article provided a detailed journal account of an extended period of hallucination authored by a patient in the immediate aftermath of his disturbance during the War of Independence. Nolan’s article was also distinguishable by its focus on the actual substance of hallucinatory experience. The patient recounted a hallucinatory episode in which a battle took place in his sickbed between an army of cockroaches and an army of hairs. These phantasmagorical battalions clearly functioned as proxies for the participants of the ‘real’ conflict raging beyond the doors of the asylum. His hallucinations were also deeply coloured by his personal relations with, and violent impulses towards, two women, one Protestant and the other Catholic. This chapter critically analyses in an ethnographic frame this account of a hallucinatory episode and the psychiatric discourse which enfolded and structured it.