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

Abstract

AbstractAimsPsychosis 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.