The social cognition of auditory verbal hallucinations

Abstract

Traditionally, auditory verbal hallucinations have been studied as an individualistic phenomena because they occur from within a single individual although they are experienced as a social phemenon, say, a hearer and a speaker interacting in a communicative exchange. This is what Vaughan Bell calls an “interesting paradox”. Despite the omission in research and in the neuropsychiatric literature current neurocognitive models points to the fact that the experience of hearing voices is at its core a social phenomena. In this paper is presented the basic historical tenets of the social cognitive neuroscience of auditory verbal hallucinations highlighting the link between social cognition and auditory verbal hallucinations.