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The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations

Wilkinson, Sam; Bell, Vaughan

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Authors

Sam Wilkinson

Vaughan Bell



Abstract

Current models of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) tend to focus on the mechanisms underlying their occurrence, but often fail to address the content of the auditory experience. In other words, they tend to ask why there are AVHs at all, instead of asking why, given that there are AVHs, they have the properties that they have. One such property, which has been largely overlooked and which we will focus on here, is why the voices are often experienced as coming from (or being the voices of) agents, and often specific, individualised agents. In this article, we argue not only that the representation of agents is important in accurately describing many cases of AVH, but also that deeper reflection on what is involved in the representation of agents has potentially vital consequences for our aetiological understanding of AVH, namely, for understanding how and why AVHs come about.

Citation

Wilkinson, S., & Bell, V. (2016). The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations. Mind and Language, 31(1), 104-126. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12096

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Feb 2, 2016
Publication Date Feb 1, 2016
Deposit Date Feb 18, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Mind and Language
Print ISSN 0268-1064
Electronic ISSN 1468-0017
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 31
Issue 1
Pages 104-126
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12096

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2016 The Authors. Mind & Language published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.




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