Ben Anderson-Day: 'Voices, Agents and Presences'

This podcast features a presentation by Dr Ben Alderson-Day on 'Voices, Agents, and Presences: Asking the “who” question of auditory verbal hallucinations’. It was recorded on Thursday 22 January 2015 as part of the 2015 Hearing the Voice Research Seminar series. Abstract: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) or ‘hearing voices’ are often described as being characterful or having their own persona. This, along with reports of voices that lack auditory characteristics but retain “presence”, has led some authors to argue that AVH may be primarily be experienced as social actors or agents, rather than simply hallucinated sounds. In this talk, Dr Alderson-Day reviews such claims and considers how existing cognitive theories of AVH may accommodate the presence of social or agent-like representations, focusing on inner speech, memory, and predictive processing accounts. He argues that the “social presence” of voices can be accommodated by existing models, but only via better recognition of how social interaction shapes ordinary speech perception and inner speech processes. Implications for understanding AVH experiences, how they develop, and how they may be managed when distressing are discussed.