Alien voices and inner dialogue: towards a developmental account of auditory verbal hallucinations

By Charles Fernyhough. 2004

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) is one of the most intriguing features of the psychiatric literature. Two alternative models of the development of AVHs in both normal and psychotic populations are proposed. In the disruption to internalisation (DI) model, AVHs result from a disruption to the normal processes of internalisation of inner speech. In the re-expansion (RE) model, AVHs result when normal inner speech is re-expanded into inner dialogue under conditions of stress and cognitive challenge. Both models draw on Vygotsky’s (The Collected Works Of L.S. Vygotsky, New York, Plenum Press, 1987) ideas about the development of inner speech. On this view, normal inner speech is considerably abbreviated relative to external speech, and also undergoes some important semantic transformations. In both the DI and RE models, AVHs arise when the subject’s inner speech involves inappropriately expanded inner dialogue, leading the subject to experience the voices in the dialogue as alien. The two models may prove useful in explaining some of the socialdevelopmental evidence surrounding the phenomenon, and also make a number of testable predictions which are suggested as priorities for future research. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology (2015, background): “Fernyhough (2004) proposed that inner speech should take two distinct forms: expanded inner speech, in which internal dialogue retains many of the phonological properties and turn-taking qualities of external dialogue, and condensed inner speech, in which the semantic and syntactic transformations…”
eview hat is that little voice inside my head ? Inner speech henomenology , its role in cognitive performance , and ts relation to self-monitoring (2014, background): “Interstingly, Fernyhough suggests that, even in adulthood, movements etween the levels may occur.”
Shot through with voices: Dissociation mediates the relationship between varieties of inner speech and auditory hallucination proneness (2014, background): “Respondents use a four-point scale (strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree) to classify evaluative statements about themselves, such as ‘‘On the whole, I am satisfied with myself’’.”
More than words? Hypomanic personality traits, visual imagery and verbal thought in young adults. (2012, background): “…a perceptual experience and verbal thought as non-perceptual breaks down, with inner speech being literally shot through with other people’s voices (Fernyhough, 2004; McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011), the validity of a distinction between mental imagery and verbal thought is supported by…”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Auditory Verbal Hallucinations as Atypical Inner Speech Monitoring, and the Potential of Neurostimulation as a Treatment Option (unknown): “Many models have assumed that the raw material of AVHs is a kind of inner speech (Bentall, 2003; Fernyhough, 2004), although definitions of inner speech have varied, from simply 'thinking in words' (McGuire et al., 1995, p. 596) to 'the overlapping region of thought and speech' (Jones and…”
The discursive nature of inner speech (2012, background): “This resembles the notion of condensed inner speech proposed by Fernyhough (2004) as the contact between multiple perspectives or thought in pure Vygotskian meaning.”
The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (2016, background): “Such models include ones that take the experience to arise as a result of misattributed inner speech (e.g. Frith, 1992; Fernyhough 2004), intrusions from memory (e.g. Badcock et al. , 2005), or even just spontaneous activation in auditory cortex (Cho and Wu, 2013).”
Getting Vygotskian about theory of mind: Mediation, dialogue, and the development of social understanding (2008, unknown): “In internalizing dialogue, and thus the semiotically mediated perspectives of their interlocutors, children‘s thinking becomes permeated by a rich array of different perspectives (Fernyhough, 1996; 2004a).”
The perceptual characteristics of voice-hallucinations in deaf people: insights into the nature of subvocal thought and sensory feedback loops. (2005, background): “Indeed, it has been suggested that the perception of a little ‘‘voice’’ in your mind may only occur during conditions of stress or cognitive challenge.(83) There is a need for clarification of the exact”
More than one voice: Investigating the phenomenological properties of inner speech requires a variety of methods☆ (2014, background): “Take the example of condensed inner speech, argued by Fernyhough (2004) to represent an important variant of ordinary inner speech, and likely to overlap with the DES categories of ‘partially unworded speaking’ and ‘unworded inner speech’ (and perhaps even ‘unsymbolized thinking’; see below).”
Inner experience in the scanner: can high fidelity apprehensions of inner experience be integrated with fMRI? (2014, background): “To our knowledge, such a distinction is typically not attended to in contemporary models of inner speech (Fernyhough, 2004; Scott, 2013), but it may be a crucial one for future studies.”
Do we need multiple models of auditory verbal hallucinations? Examining the phenomenological fit of cognitive and neurological models. (2010, background): “A Vygotskian approach to inner speech has proposed that our thinking takes the form of a dialogue that is literally shot through with other voices.(44) Similarly, Dialogical Self Theory proposes that inner speech can involve multiple sets of characters, with autonomous thought centers, that interact”
The varieties of inner speech: links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults. (2011, background): “This has led to the proposal that inner speech takes at least two forms, condensed and expanded (Fernyhough, 2004), a view which is backed up by findings from the study of children’s private speech (Fernyhough, 2009) and by the evidence from introspection (Martínez-Manrique & Vicente, 2010).”