Auditory verbal hallucinations occur along a continuum from the general population to patients with psychosis, yet how sensory feedback processing and attention control interact along this continuum is unclear. By manipulating self-voice quality (from neutral to angry) and measuring brain activity with electroencephalography, the study found that hallucination proneness (HP) modulated the N100 and P200 suppression effects regardless of voice quality. Individuals with high HP showed an increased N100 response to self-generated voices and an increased P200 response to externally-generated voices, suggesting heightened error awareness and attention allocation during self-voice production due to altered sensory feedback processing and attentional control. These findings indicate that altered sensory feedback processing in self-voice production is a fundamental characteristic of the HP continuum, independent of clinical status.
Hallucination research is an interdisciplinary field that combines psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This article outlines key conceptual issues, such as how hallucinations differ from other perceptual alterations and whether they form a single construct. It reviews experimental paradigms that measure enduring hallucinatory tendencies versus those capturing hallucinations in real time, along with rating instruments like confidence scales and the phenomenological approach focusing on first-person experience. A checklist of variables—including sensory modality, context, cognitive style, affective state, and cultural background—is provided for researchers to consider before designing studies.
Resting state brain activity is inherently non-stationary. Hidden Semi-Markov Models can characterize continuous resting state data as a sequence of recurring brain states. Previous research suggested that EEG brain state dynamics in the alpha frequency link to auditory hallucination proneness in non-clinical individuals. This study aimed to replicate those findings. Most brain states were reproducible across different data sets, confirming robust and generalizable EEG resting state dynamics. However, the association with hallucination proneness was not directly reproducible across data sets.