Schizophr Bull
February 1, 2019
Elizabeth Pienkos, Anne Giersch, Marie Hansen et al.
93 citations
Hallucinations are often studied as isolated symptoms, but this review argues that they emerge from a broader set of changes in cognition, perception, selfhood, time, interpersonal experience, and embodiment. The authors suggest that grouping different hallucinatory experiences under a single definition may obscure meaningful differences in their causes and subjective qualities. They review phenomenological and neurocognitive theories and the role of trauma, proposing that hallucinations are an equifinal outcome of multiple genetic, neurocognitive, subjective, and social processes. Future research should incorporate a wider range of experiential alterations, and clinical practice should use phenomenologically responsive techniques and develop targeted therapies.
Psychopathology
January 1, 2023
Cherise Rosen, Sohee Park, Tatiana Baxter et al.
13 citations
Sensed presence—the feeling that someone or something is there despite no one being present—is a common experience that can occur in many contexts, from isolation to psychosis. This online survey of adults found three distinct clusters of people based on their levels of sensed presence, attenuated psychosis symptoms, and transliminality (a trait involving absorption, fantasy proneness, and heightened sensitivity). One cluster had few sensed presence experiences, low psychosis symptoms, and low transliminality. A second cluster had moderate sensed presence, low psychosis symptoms, and moderate transliminality, along with increased closeness to God.
November 7, 2022
Joseph M Barnby, Sohee Park, Tatiana Baxter et al.
1 citation
preprint
The felt presence (FP) experience—the sense that someone else is nearby without sensory evidence—ranges from benevolent to distressing and can be personified or ambiguous. FP occurs in neuropsychological conditions, psychosis, paranoia, sleep paralysis, anxiety, endurance sports, and spiritualist communities. This review covers philosophical, phenomenological, clinical, and non-clinical aspects of FP, along with psychometric, cognitive, and neurophysiological measurement methods. It presents current mechanistic explanations, proposes a unifying cognitive framework, and identifies outstanding questions. FP provides a window into the cognitive neuroscience of own-body awareness and social agency detection, an intuitive but poorly understood experience in health and disorder.
Schizophrenia bulletin
April 10, 2026
Cherise Rosen, Liping Tong, Julia G Lebovitz et al.
Depersonalization (DP) and derealization (DR) are alterations in sense of self and lifeworld that often co-occur in psychosis. Over 20 years, the Chicago Longitudinal Study examined these phenomena across psychiatric categories. DP was broadly distributed across diagnoses, while DR showed greater specificity to schizophrenia. Network analyses revealed three foundational constructs in schizophrenia: alteration in sense of self/lifeworld, multisensory experiences, and bodily experiences; bodily and multisensory alterations were foundational in affective-psychosis. Self-disturbance emerged as foundational only in schizophrenia. The findings support reframing DP and DR as points on a continuum of attenuated alterations in sense of self and lifeworld, representing a fundamental self-disturbance in existential feeling.