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15 results

  • Reduced attention-driven auditory sensitivity in hallucination-prone individuals

  • Louise H. Rayner, Kwang-Hyuk Lee, Peter W. R. Woodruff
  • Journal:
    The British Journal of Psychiatry / Volume 207 / Issue 5 / November 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 January 2018, pp. 414-419
    Print publication:
    November 2015
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  • Background

    Evidence suggests that auditory hallucinations may result from abnormally enhanced auditory sensitivity.

    Aims

    To investigate whether there is an auditory processing bias in healthy individuals who are prone to experiencing auditory hallucinations.

    Method

    Two hundred healthy volunteers performed a temporal order judgement task in which they determined whether an auditory or a visual stimulus came first under conditions of directed attention (‘attend-auditory’ and ‘attend-visual’ conditions). The Launay–Slade Hallucination Scale was used to divide the sample into high and low hallucination-proneness groups.

    Results

    The high hallucination-proneness group exhibited a reduced sensitivity to auditory stimuli under the attend-auditory condition. By contrast, attention-directed visual sensitivity did not differ significantly between groups.

    Conclusions

    Healthy individuals prone to hallucinatory experiences may possess a bias in attention towards internal auditory stimuli at the expense of external sounds. Interventions involving the redistribution of attentional resources would have therapeutic benefit in patients experiencing auditory hallucinations.

  • Professor John Anthony (Sean) Spence

  • Peter W. R. Woodruff
  • Journal:
    The Psychiatrist / Volume 35 / Issue 8 / August 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 January 2018, p. 319
    Print publication:
    August 2011
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      • Open access
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Empathy in Mental Illness
  • Edited by Tom F. D. Farrow, Peter W. R. Woodruff
  • Published online:
    17 August 2009
    Print publication:
    29 March 2007
  • The lack of ability to emphathize is central to many psychiatric conditions. Empathy is affected by neurodevelopment, brain pathology and psychiatric illness. Empathy is both a state and a trait characteristic. Empathy is measurable by neuropsychological assessment and neuroimaging techniques. This book, first published in 2007, specifically focuses on the role of empathy in mental illness. It starts with the clinical psychiatric perspective and covers empathy in the context of mental illness, adult health, developmental course, and explanatory models. Psychiatrists, psychotherapists and mental heath professionals will find this a very useful reference for their work.

  • Neurocognitive basis of insight in schizophrenia

  • Ashok Mysore, Randolph W. Parks, Kwang-Hyuk Lee, Rajinder S. Bhaker, Paul Birkett, Peter W. R. Woodruff
  • Journal:
    The British Journal of Psychiatry / Volume 190 / Issue 6 / June 2007
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 January 2018, pp. 529-530
    Print publication:
    June 2007
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  • People with schizophrenia have been categorised into three groups: those with full insight (aware, correct attributers); those aware of being unwell, but who misattributed their symptoms (aware, incorrect attributers); and those unaware of being ill (unaware). Cluster analysis of ‘awareness of illness' and ‘relabelling of symptoms' scores on the Schedule for the Assessment of Insight confirmed three distinct subgroups. The unaware group were impaired on executive and memory tests, whereas those in the aware, misattributing group were cognitively intact. Findings support an association between unawareness of illness and executive dysfunction, and highlight the separation of symptom misattribution from unawareness of illness.

  • Foreword

  • Edited by Tom F. D. Farrow, University of Sheffield, Peter W. R. Woodruff, University of Sheffield
  • Book:
    Empathy in Mental Illness
    Published online:
    17 August 2009
    Print publication:
    29 March 2007, pp ix-xxii

  • Summary

    Empathy literally means ‘the power of understanding things outside ourselves’ after the Greek empatheia, but has come to imply a reliance on ‘inner feeling’, from the German ein (in) fuhlung (feeling), and even an implied sense of ‘cure’ from ‘em-pathy’ the suffix-pathy meaning a ‘method of cure’. It is after all through examination of our inner feelings that we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves. Our ability to relate to those feelings we see expressed by others depends on an ability to compare them with those we may have experienced ourselves, which allows us to infer ‘what the other person must be going through’. The accuracy of our inference depends upon empatheia.

    Much of psychotherapy depends on helping individuals to analyse and hence reach some emotional understanding of their inner world to enable them to relate more adaptively to people and events outside themselves. In this sense there is an assumption that individuals possess the ‘capacity’ to empathize. This capacity may be encouraged and developed through therapy. There is also an assumption that there may be individuals who lack such a capacity or, if they do possess it, may use it in a maladaptive way which can cause difficulties in their relationships. This raises the question of whether the ‘psyche’ or its substrate (the brain) lacks a necessary processing capacity or ‘neural network’ to empathize adequately.