Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Norway.
Schizophr Res. 2012 Sep;140(1-3):59-64. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2012.06.019. Epub 2012 Jul 15.
We report evidence that auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in schizophrenia patients are perceptual distortions lateralized to the left hemisphere. We used a dichotic listening task with repeated presentations of consonant-vowel syllables, a different syllable in the right and left ear. This task produces more correct reports for the right ear syllable in healthy individuals, indicative of left hemisphere speech processing focus. If AVHs are lateralized to the left hemisphere language receptive areas, then this should interfere with correct right ear reports in the dichotic task, which would result in significant negative correlations with severity of AVHs. We correlated the right and left ear correct reports with the PANSS hallucination symptom, and a randomly selected negative symptom, in addition to the sum total of the positive and negative symptoms, in 160 patients with schizophrenia. The results confirmed the predictions with significant negative correlations for the right ear scores with the PANSS hallucination item, and for the sum total of positive symptoms, while all other correlations were close to zero. The results are unambiguous evidence for AVHs as aberrant speech perceptions originating in the left hemisphere.
我们报告了证据表明，精神分裂症患者的听觉言语幻觉（AVH）是偏向左侧大脑半球的感知扭曲。我们使用了一种双耳分听任务，重复呈现辅音-元音音节，右耳和左耳中的音节不同。在健康个体中，该任务产生更多正确的右耳音节报告，表明左侧半球的言语处理焦点。如果 AVH 偏向于左侧大脑半球的语言接受区域，那么这应该会干扰双耳任务中的正确右耳报告，从而导致与 AVH 严重程度的显著负相关。我们将右耳和左耳的正确报告与 PANSS 幻觉症状以及随机选择的阴性症状相关联，除了阳性和阴性症状的总和之外，还与 160 名精神分裂症患者相关联。结果证实了这些预测，与 PANSS 幻觉项目的右耳评分以及阳性症状的总和呈显著负相关，而所有其他相关性则接近零。结果明确表明，AVH 是源自左侧大脑半球的异常言语感知。
