PhD defence Maria De Fátima Pereira Amorim

Keywords: Auditory Verbal Hallucinations, Emotion Salience Processing, Inhibitory Control, EEG

"Understanding auditory verbal hallucinations: Through the lens of Emotional Salience and Inhibitory Control"

Some individuals hear voices without an external source — an experience known as auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH). These are commonly associated with conditions like schizophrenia, but past research shows that some individuals in the general population report AVH without needing mental health care.

This thesis examined whether individuals prone to experience AVH process emotional information differently and/or struggle to suppress irrelevant information/responses, and whether these mechanisms are interdependent. Using auditory-based tasks while collecting EEG data, it was found that as AVH proneness increased, there were changes in emotional salience processing; and when emotion is at play, AVH proneness modulates performance in tasks tapping into resistance to interference and behavioral inhibition mechanisms.

This thesis findings suggest that AVH is a fundamentally perceptual phenomenon modulated by cognitive processes and that these experiences exist on a spectrum. Understanding these subtle differences in perception could help explain why some voice hearers need clinical support while others do not.

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