Intrusive thoughts and reality discrimination in hallucinations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58445/rars.2691Keywords:
Hallucinations, Intrusive thoughts, Reality DiscriminationAbstract
Hallucinations are perceptions that feel real without the presence of external stimuli. Research suggests that intrusive thoughts and weak reality discrimination make an individual susceptible to hallucinations, yet the existence of a connection between these factors is still unknown. This review examines how intrusive thoughts and weak reality discrimination independently affect susceptibility to hallucinations, and to what extent these factors are interrelated. This paper first examines the individual contributions of intrusive thoughts and weak reality discrimination to the occurrence of hallucinations. Hallucinations are externalized intrusive thoughts via cognitive dissonance, where cognitive dissonance occurs when an individual is in an uncomfortable state because of their contradicting beliefs or facets of knowledge. To reduce this dissonance, the human body may resort to hallucinating. This makes intrusive thoughts the material for hallucinations. Reality discrimination, on the other hand, is the ability to differentiate between internally generated and externally generated activity. It is proposed that during the process of reality discrimination, other skills such as reality testing and reality monitoring overlap, which results as a hallucination. Reality testing is the process in which an individual understands the connection between them and the outside world and social surroundings while reality monitoring describes the ability to discern the source of internal self-generated information from external generated information. This paper subsequently examines whether or not intrusive thoughts and weak reality discrimination interact to make an individual prone to hallucinations. It is hypothesized that, because both intrusive thoughts and weak reality discrimination are accompanied with negative emotions, they could also be enabled by them. A second proposed hypothesis is the externalization of intrusive thoughts when there is the overlap of the cognitive skills of reality testing, reality monitoring and reality discrimination, resulting in hallucinations.
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