The multifactorial structure of the predisposition to hallucinate and associations with anxiety, depression and stress

Depression, anxiety and stress are commonly experienced by individuals predisposed to hallucinations and often accompany hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia. Analogous to hallucinatory experiences themselves, hallucination predisposition is measured as a multidimensional construct, though many competing structures have been proposed. Few studies have examined the association between negative affect and the individual subcomponents of hallucination predisposition. This paper describes two related studies: the first aimed to confirm the multifactorial structure of hallucinatory predisposition assessed with the Launay–Slade Hallucination Scale-Revised (LSHS-R; Bentall & Slade, 1985); the second study aimed to examine the association between depression, anxiety, and stress and the separate components of hallucinatory predisposition in a non-psychiatric population. The first study showed that a three-factor model of hallucination predisposition (Waters, Badcock, & Maybery, 2003a) was superior to two competing models. The second study showed that anxiety was most consistently related to the predisposition to hallucinate, being associated with all three of the LSHS-R components, even after the variance shared with the other two affective constructs was partialled out. The possible influence of anxiety on cognitive mechanisms (in particular, intentional inhibition) potentially involved in hallucination predisposition was discussed.