Person-ness of voices in lived experience accounts of psychosis: combining literary linguistics and clinical psychology

et al. 2022

IJCL

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Triangulating corpus linguistic approaches with other (linguistic and non-linguistic) approaches enhances “both the rigour of corpus linguistics and its incorporation into all kinds of research” (McEnery & Hardie, 2012: 227). Our study investigates an important area of mental health research: the experiences of those who hear voices that others cannot hear, and particularly the ways in which those voices are described as person-like. We apply corpus methods to augment the findings of a qualitative approach to 40 interviews with voice-hearers, whereby each interview was coded as involving ‘minimal’ or ‘complex’ personification of voices. Our analysis provides linguistic evidence in support of the qualitative coding of the interviews, but also goes beyond a binary approach by revealing different types and degrees of personification of voices, based on how they are referred to and described by voice-hearers. We relate these findings to concepts that inform therapeutic interventions in clinical psychology.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Minimal Personificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corpus linguistics and clinical psychology

Collins

Březina

et al. 2022

IJCL

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“…For the majority of the participants, particularly those on the wards, illusory social agents appeared frequently and were relatively dynamic characters that sometimes irritated or angered the participants but at other times offered comfort and humour. Based on the scalar model of minimal to complex personification of voices developed by Semino et al (2020), these qualities of (i) having 'online' emotions, (ii) possessing internal states and motivations that are not accessible to the participants, (iii) engaging in interactions with participants, and (iv) having different behaviours, suggest that many social agents are personified in complex ways that are similar to the way real people are perceived in the shared external social world. Notably, Wilkinson and Bell (2016) suggested that 'externally individuated' illusory social agents in psychosis (i.e.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Illusory social agents within and beyond voices: a computational linguistics analysis of the experience of psychosis

Shiel

Bell

2021

Preprint

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AimsPsychosis has a strong social component and often involves the experience of being affected by ‘illusory social agents’. However, this experience remains under-characterised, particularly for social agents in delusions and non-vocal hallucinations. One useful approach is a form of computational linguistics called corpus linguistics that studies texts to identify patterns of meaning encoded in both the semantics and linguistic structure of the text.MethodsTwenty people living with psychosis were recruited from community and inpatient services. They participated in open-ended interviews on their experiences of social agents in psychosis and completed a measure of psychotic symptoms. Corpus linguistics analysis was used to identify key phenomenological features of vocal and non-vocal social agents in psychosis.ResultsSocial agents are i) represented with varying levels of richness in participants’ experiences, ii) are attributed with different kinds of identities including physical characteristics and names, iii) are perceived to have internal states and motivations that are different from those of the participants, and iv) interact with participants in various ways including through communicative speech acts, affecting participants’ bodies and moving through space. These representation were equally rich for agents associated with hallucinated voices and those associated with non-vocal hallucinations and delusions.ConclusionsWe show that the experience of illusory social agents is a rich and complex social experience reflecting many aspects of genuine social interaction and is not solely present in auditory hallucinations, but also in delusions and non-vocal hallucinations.

“…Based on the scalar model of minimal to complex personification of voices developed by Semino, Demjén, and Collins ( 2020 ), these qualities of (i) having ‘online’ emotions, (ii) possessing internal states and motivations that are not accessible to the participants, (iii) engaging in interactions with participants, and (iv) having different behaviours suggest that many social agents are personified in complex ways that are similar to the way real people are perceived in the shared external social world. Notably, Wilkinson and Bell ( 2016 ) suggested that ‘externally individuated’ illusory social agents in psychosis (i.e., those that do correspond to external identities) reflect a richer agent representation than internally individuated ones, but the evidence presented here suggests that internally individuated agents may be equally as rich in terms of their human‐like agentive properties.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Illusory social agents within and beyond voices: A computational linguistics analysis of the experience of psychosis

Shiel

British J Clinic Psychol

Bell

2021

Self Cite

Objectives. Psychosis has a strong social component and often involves the experience of being affected by 'illusory social agents'. However, this experience remains undercharacterized, particularly for social agents in delusions and non-vocal hallucinations. One useful approach is a form of computational linguistics called corpus linguistics that studies texts to identify patterns of meaning encoded in both the semantics and linguistic structure of the text.Methods. Twenty people living with psychosis were recruited from community and inpatient services. They participated in open-ended interviews on their experiences of social agents in psychosis and completed a measure of psychotic symptoms. Corpus linguistics analysis was used to identify key phenomenological features of vocal and nonvocal social agents in psychosis.Results. Social agents i) are represented with varying levels of richness in participants' experiences, ii) are attributed with different kinds of identities including physical characteristics and names, iii) are perceived to have internal states and motivations that are different from those of the participants, and iv) interact with participants in various ways including through communicative speech acts, affecting participants' bodies, and moving through space. These representations were equally rich for agents associated with hallucinated voices and those associated with non-vocal hallucinations and delusions.Conclusions. We show that the experience of illusory social agents is a rich and complex social experience reflecting many aspects of genuine social interaction and is not solely present in auditory hallucinations, but also in delusions and non-vocal hallucinations.