Testing a model of auditory hallucinations: the role of negative emotions and cognitive resources

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Models of auditory hallucinations (AH) state that AH arise through an interaction between negative emotions and limited available cognitive resources. However, this hypothesis has never been directly tested. Methods: A two-by-two factorial design was used to examine the effect of emotions (neutral VS negative) and available cognitive resources (high VS low) on the elicitation of false alarms in an auditory signal detection paradigm. One hundred and seventy four healthy participants were assigned to one of the four experimental conditions. While participants were listening to white noise, their emotional state was manipulated using affective pictures and the level of available cognitive resources was manipulated using a visual N-back task. Results: Results revealed significant interaction effects between emotions and cognitive resources on the number of false alarms. In particular, participants with fewer available cognitive resources and at the same time who were in a negative emotional state, tended to hear significantly more false alarms. In addition, the degree of certitude was significantly correlated with a higher degree of hallucination proneness. Conclusions: Such results are in agreement with models of AH and they provide new data for the understanding of the emotional and cognitive mechanisms that underpin AH.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychosis
• schizophrenia
• positive symptom
• affect
• cognition

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank David Smailes as well as two anonymous Reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Julien Laloyaux http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2856-3652

Notes

1. As a reminder, the N-back task contained 20% of targets, 30% is thus significantly better than chance level, p < 0.01.

2. The reported values are issued from the normative data of the IAPS (Lang et al., 2008). The dimensions of the IAPS were assessed using a graphic scale. In the case of the valence, the dimension was ordinally scaled with five figures representing a happy face on one end of the scale, and a sad face on the other end.