Hallucination-proneness is associated with more extreme social evaluations of external voices
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Auditory verbal hallucinations are often experienced as the voices of entities who have a character and personality of their own. We asked whether hallucination-proneness in listeners affects how they evaluate the personality of external voices. 48 participants who self-reported a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder, and 50 participants without a similar diagnosis rated brief vowel recordings on attractiveness, competence, dominance, friendliness and trustworthiness. Hallucination-proneness was measured with the Cardiff Anomalous Perceptions Scale (CAPS) and the auditory hallucinations subscale of the Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales (PSYRATS-AH). Despite clearly higher symptom levels in listeners diagnosed with psychotic disorders, there was no group-level difference in average social trait evaluations, nor were average ratings associated with hallucination-proneness. There was, however, a numerical trend for listeners diagnosed with psychotic disorders to report more extreme social trait evaluations, where additionally, greater hallucination-proneness was also significantly associated with more extreme ratings across all social traits, on both measures. This association was, however, primarily present in controls but not in listeners diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Hallucination-proneness therefore appears to amplify, rather than directionally bias, social trait evaluations of voices. Our findings link proneness to experiencing internal voices, i.e. auditory verbal hallucinations, to how external voices are perceived. This finding is broadly consistent with previous work reporting that hallucination-prone individuals may be more likely to detect a signal (here: a salient social evaluation) in relatively ambiguous stimuli, speaking to mechanistic accounts that propose that stronger priors imbue stimuli with meaning.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221794404