No description available.

The main aim of this study was to explore and identify the factors associated with compliance with command hallucinations to harm self or others. The theoretical foundations lie in psychological models of auditory hallucinations in general and command hallucinations in particular, and in social models of compliance. Previous research in this area has highlighted the importance of beliefs about self and beliefs about voices in understanding the relationship between the command and the associated behaviour. Seventy four individuals who reported hearing voices were recruited into the study, 76% of these reported currently hearing command hallucinations (CH) 88% of whom reported hearing dangerous commands to either harm others, or harm or kill themselves. CHs were followed up at two intervals over a six month period. In terms of compliance, a good deal of support emerged for the beliefs aspect of the cognitive behavioural model of command hallucinations. All compilers, regardless of the content of the command were more distressed than non-compliers and reported stronger beliefs about malevolence and omnipotence. The findings with regard to beliefs about benevolence were more inconsistent. In addition to beliefs about voices, there were factors that appeared to be specific to compliance with each respective content: those who complied with harm-other commands were significantly more compliant by nature, reported significantly higher levels of guilt, rated their voices as louder and more real, and were significantly more resistant towards the voices those who complied with suicide commands appeared to do so because they believed themselves to be inferior to others and felt that they didn't belong, and because the commands were congruent with their mood and beliefs those that complied with commands to self-harm appeared to do so because they felt physically and emotionally overwhelmed by the commands. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the current findings and the implications for future research into this area and the clinical treatment and management of command hallucinations.

No description available.

Relationalism claims that the phenomenal character of perception is constituted by the obtaining of a non-representational psychological relation to mind-independent objects. Although relationalism provides what seems to be the most straightforward and intuitive account of how experience strikes us introspectively, it is very often believed that the argument from hallucination shows that the view is untenable. The aim of this thesis is to defend relationalism against the argument from hallucination. The argument claims that the phenomenal character of hallucination and perception deserves the same account, and that relationalism cannot be true for hallucinations, therefore relationalism must be rejected. This argument relies on the Indiscriminability Principle (IND), the claim that two experiences that are introspectively indiscriminable from each other have the same phenomenal character. Before assessing the plausibility of this principle, I first consider and dismiss versions of the argument which wouldn’t depend on IND. Although widely accepted, no satisfactory support for IND has been presented yet. In this thesis I argue that defending IND requires that we understand the notion of ‘indiscriminability’ employed in IND in an impersonal sense. I then identify what underwrites IND: the intuition that, in virtue of its superficiality, the nature of a phenomenal character must be accessible through introspection, together with the claim that it is not possible to deny IND without denying the superficiality of phenomenal characters too. I argue that the relationalist can deny IND while preserving the superficiality of phenomenal characters. This can be done by adopting a negative view of hallucination and an account of introspection whereby the phenomenal character doesn’t exist independently of one’s introspective awareness of it and where having introspective access to our experience depends on our perceptual access to the world.

La littérature indique que les consommateurs de cannabis sont fragilisés, tant au niveau émotionnel que cognitif. Nous pensions que ces dysfonctionnements pouvaient être associés à un appauvrissement du rappel autobiographique. Nous observons en effet, au travers cette étude exploratoire, que les usagers réguliers de cannabis éprouvent des difficultés à récupérer des évènements autobiographiques spécifiques, ce qui est révélateur d’un biais de surgénéralité. Il apparaît que la fonction adaptative que revêt l’usage de cannabis influence le rappel d’évènements généraux chez les usagers, bien plus que ne le font les facteurs représentatifs de leur fonctionnement émotionnel. Par conséquent, nous suggérons qu’au sein de cette population, la fonction «adaptative de l’usage, illustre, bien plus que d’autres facteurs prédicteurs, l’hypothèse d’évitement fonctionnel (Williams, 2006) afin d’expliquer la survenue de ce biais de surgénéralité. Au regard, à présent, de la valence émotionnelle des évènements autobiographiques rappelés par les usagers, cette recherche ne nous a pas permis de mettre en évidence de surreprésentation des évènements négatifs au sein du rappel autobiographique des usagers, contrairement à ce que nous envisagions au regard de la littérature. Il est possible de penser que ces résultats sont dus, entre autre, à l’effet des cannabinoïdes sur la modulation des émotions. Toutefois, afin de nous en assurer, nous aurions besoin que d’autres recherches s’attèlent à répondre sur cette question. / The literature indicates that cannabis users are vulnerable, both emotionally and cognitively. We expected that these dysfunctions may be associated with a loss of autobiographical recall. Indeed, through this exploratory study, we observe that regular cannabis users have difficulties to retrieve specific autobiographical events, which is indicative of a surgenerality bias. It appears that adaptive use motivation influences the recall of general events in users, much more than the representative factors of their emotional functioning. Therefore, we suggest that, in this population, adaptive use motive, illustrate, much more than other predictors, the functional avoidance assumption (Williams, 2006) to explain the occurrence of this surgenerality bias. Given, now, the emotional valence of autobiographical events recalled by the users, this research does not allow to demonstrate overrepresentation of negative events in the autobiographical recall of users, contrary to what we envisaged in the light of literature. It is possible to think that these results are due, among other things, to the effect of cannabinoids on the modulation of emotions. However, to confirm this, we need more research gets done to answer this question.