Estado actual de la investigación psicológica en las alucinaciones auditivas

Abstract

In this work we present a revision of the psychological investigation about the study of verbal auditory hallucinations. All that has been previously written on this issue differences between the studies that have tried to discover the psychological mechanisms that intervene in the formation of hallucinations, from those others that deal with their maintenance. All these studies affirm that voices are related to inside speech that is wrongly attributed to other agents. The three main hypothesis that try to explain how this inside atribution is produced, are here described: Frith´s hypothesis about selfmonitoring, Bentall´s about the failure in the reality discrimination processes, and Morrison´s about metacognitive variables and cognitive dissonance. The most relevant factors described in the bibliography on this issue are underlined in the studies about voices´ maintenance: the believes about voices, the relation to them, the safety behaviours and emotions. To
end up, the main clinical contributions to these investigations are summed up.