Psychopathology
August 27, 2026
Sarah Parry, Sarah Carr, Ben Alderson-Day
Felt presence (FP) is an emerging field of clinical research and to our knowledge there are no studies exploring the phenomenon within children and young people. The current study aims to address this by reporting the experiences of FPs from a clinical sample of young people involved in the ChUSE trial, a feasibility and acceptability RCT looking at supporting young people with distressing...
Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition
February 10, 2026
Ben Alderson-Day
Abstract Lucid dreaming refers to the awareness that one is experiencing a dream, which for some may also include being able to control actions in events in the dreamworld. In recent years there has been growing interest in the experimental possibilities of lucid dreaming, and its potential benefits for health and wellbeing. But who are the lucid dreamers, and how do they have (or learn) this...
Schizophrenia
November 26, 2025
Ben Alderson-Day, Peter Moseley, Angela Woods et al.
Felt presence (FP) - sensing another person without clear sensory evidence - has been described in psychosis for over a century but rarely studied due to challenges in recognition and assessment. Recently FP has been identified as a transdiagnostic phenomenon and highlighted by people with lived experience of psychosis as a clinical priority. Here we describe FP presentation in a first-episode...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
October 6, 2025
Charles Fernyhough, Janna De Boer, Paige E Davis et al.
3 citations
Hallucinations figure prominently in a range of psychiatric disorders but, to date, their developmental origins are not well understood. The aim of the present article is to explore how ideas from mainstream developmental psychology can enhance understanding of how hallucinations develop in different modalities across the lifecourse. Hallucinations vary in their clinical significance depending...
Psychosis
September 25, 2024
Ariel Swyer, Angela Woods, Amanda Ellison et al.
Background: Non-clinical voice-hearers (NCVHs) have been the subject of a growing body of psychological research, a primary aim of which is the development of new therapeutic techniques to support those who struggle with voice-hearing. However, relatively little research has examined non-clinical voice-hearing experiences beyond their relationship with clinical voice-hearing. Methods: The...
Psychological Medicine
June 1, 2023
Ben Alderson-Day, Peter Moseley, Kaja Mitrenga et al.
19 citations
Experiences of felt presence (FP) are well documented in neurology, neuropsychology and bereavement research, but systematic research in relation to psychopathology is limited. FP is a feature of sensorimotor disruption in psychosis, hypnagogic experiences, solo pursuits and spiritual encounters, but research comparing these phenomena remains rare. A comparative approach to the phenomenology of...
The Lancet Psychiatry
May 1, 2023
Joseph M Barnby, Sohee Park, Tatiana Baxter et al.
1 citation
The felt presence experience is the basic feeling that someone else is present in the immediate environment, without clear sensory evidence. Ranging from benevolent to distressing, personified to ambiguous, felt presence has been observed in neurological case studies and within psychosis and paranoia, associated with sleep paralysis and anxiety, and recorded within endurance sports and...
Manchester University Press eBooks
March 21, 2023
Ben Alderson-Day
This chapter looks at sleep as potentially one of the most powerful sources of presence. The presences that come with sleep paralysis are not like most of the presences we have met so far. These visitors are much more likely to be experienced in a negative fashion. The phenomenon of sleep paralysis acts as an important testing ground for many of the key questions around felt presence.
Schizophrenia Bulletin
February 1, 2023
Tanya M Luhrmann, Ben Alderson-Day, Ann Chen et al.
AbstractThere are communities in which hearing voices frequently is common and expected, and in which participants are not expected to have a need for care. This paper compares the ideas and practices of these communities. We observe that these communities utilize cultural models to identify and to explain voice-like events—and that there are some common features to these models across...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
September 1, 2022
Peter Moseley, Adam Powell, Angela Woods et al.
15 citations
Voice-hearing in clinical and nonclinical groups has previously been compared using standardized assessments of psychotic experiences. Findings from several studies suggest that nonclinical voice-hearing is distinguished by reduced distress and increased control. However, symptom-rating scales developed for clinical populations may be limited in their ability to elucidate subtle aspects of...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
February 1, 2022
Ben Alderson-Day, Jamie Moffatt, César F. Lima et al.
Abstract Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs)—or hearing voices—occur in clinical and non-clinical populations, but their mechanisms remain unclear. Predictive processing models of psychosis have proposed that hallucinations arise from an over-weighting of prior expectations in perception. It is unknown, however, whether this reflects (i) a sensitivity to explicit modulation of prior knowledge...
October 8, 2021
Ben Alderson-Day, Peter Moseley, Kaja Mitrenga et al.
2 citations
preprint
Experiences of felt presence (FP) are well documented in neurology, neuropsychology, and bereavement research, but systematic research in psychiatry is limited. Reports of FP are a feature of body disruption in psychosis, hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences, solo pursuits, and spiritual encounters, yet systematic research comparing these phenomena is rare. Here we present a mixed-methods...
Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy
September 25, 2020
Guy Dodgson, Ben Alderson-Day, David Smailes et al.
Abstract Background: Cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis (CBTp) is a recommended treatment for psychotic experiences, but its effectiveness has been questioned. One way of addressing this may be to tailor therapy materials to the phenomenology of specific psychotic experiences. Aim: In this study, we investigated the acceptability of a novel treatment manual for subtypes of...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
August 19, 2020
Karina Stengaard Kamp, Edith Maria Steffen, Ben Alderson-Day et al.
67 citations
Bereaved people often report having sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased (SED), and there is an ongoing debate over whether SED are associated with pathology, such as grief complications. Research into these experiences has been conducted in various disciplines, including psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology, without much crossover. This review brings these areas of...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
June 19, 2020
Ben Alderson-Day, Angela Woods, Peter Moseley et al.
59 citations
Recent therapeutic approaches to auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) exploit the person-like qualities of voices. Little is known, however, about how, why, and when AVH become personified. We aimed to investigate personification in individuals' early voice-hearing experiences. We invited Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) service users aged 16-65 to participate in a semistructured interview...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2020
Tehseen Noorani, Ben Alderson-Day
8 citations
In 'REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Towards a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics', Carhart-Harris and Friston offer an important analysis of what the predictive processing framework has to offer our understanding of psychedelic experiences, providing an invaluable ground for psychedelic psychiatry. While applauding this, we encourage paying greater attention to contextual factors...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 6, 2018
Charles Fernyhough, Ben Alderson-Day, Russell T. Hurlburt et al.
Research into resting-state cognition has often struggled with the challenge of assessing inner experience in the resting state. We employed Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), a method aimed at generating detailed and high-fidelity descriptions of experience, to investigate how experience in the resting state can vary between internal, external, and multiple simultaneous streams. Using a...
Consciousness and Cognition
October 2018
Peter Moseley, Ben Alderson-Day, Sukhbinder Kumar et al.
Musical hallucinations (MH) account for a significant proportion of auditory hallucinations, but there is a relative lack of research into their phenomenology. In contrast, much research has focused on other forms of internally generated musical experience, such as earworms (involuntary and repetitive inner music), showing that they can vary in perceived control, repetitiveness, and in their...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
August 8, 2018
Tanya M Luhrmann, Ben Alderson-Day, Vaughan Bell et al.
74 citations
That trauma can play a significant role in the onset and maintenance of voice-hearing is one of the most striking and important developments in the recent study of psychosis. Yet the finding that trauma increases the risk for hallucination and for psychosis is quite different from the claim that trauma is necessary for either to occur. Trauma is often but not always associated with...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
June 29, 2016
Flavie Waters, Jan Dirk Blom, Thien Thanh Dang‐Vu et al.
By definition, hallucinations occur only in the full waking state. Yet similarities to sleep-related experiences such as hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, dreams and parasomnias, have been noted since antiquity. These observations have prompted researchers to suggest a common aetiology for these phenomena based on the neurobiology of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. With our recent...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
June 8, 2016
Ben Alderson-Day, Kelly Diederen, Charles Fernyhough et al.
134 citations
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the potential for alterations to the brain's resting-state networks (RSNs) to explain various kinds of psychopathology. RSNs provide an intriguing new explanatory framework for hallucinations, which can occur in different modalities and population groups, but which remain poorly understood. This collaboration from the International...
2016
Ben Alderson-Day, Felicity Callard
Psychologist Ben Alderson-Day and geographer Felicity Callard share an interest in understanding how interdisciplinary approaches to the brain sciences that involve the social sciences and humanities can help open up new research questions and methods through which to understand pathological and non-pathological states of mind. Both have been interested in the fertility of resting-state...
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
October 21, 2015
Sam Wilkinson, Ben Alderson-Day
In this introduction we present the orthodox account of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), a number of worries for this account, and some potential responses open to its proponents. With some problems still remaining, we then introduce the problems presented by the phenomenon of thought insertion, in particular the question of how different it is supposed to be from AVHs. We then mention...
Psychological Bulletin
May 25, 2015
Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough
Inner speech—also known as covert speech or verbal thinking—has been implicated in theories of cognitive development, speech monitoring, executive function, and psychopathology. Despite a growing body of knowledge on its phenomenology, development, and function, approaches to the scientific study of inner speech have remained diffuse and largely unintegrated. This review examines prominent...
The Lancet Psychiatry
March 31, 2015
Angela Woods, Nev Jones, Ben Alderson-Day et al.
Background: Auditory hallucinations--or voices--are a common feature of many psychiatric disorders and are also experienced by individuals with no psychiatric history. Understanding of the variation in subjective experiences of hallucination is central to psychiatry, yet systematic empirical research on the phenomenology of auditory hallucinations remains scarce. We aimed to record a detailed...