ArticleSchizophrenia bulletin2023
Social Deafferentation and the Relation Between Loneliness and Hallucinations.
Article in Schizophrenia bulletin, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social functioning, loneliness, and psychosis phenotype in the general population: a network analysis perspective.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2026Article
- Momentary dynamics of inner speech varieties, auditory verbal hallucinations, and affect in schizophrenia spectrum disorders: an experience sampling study.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Detecting Features of Interpersonal Difficulties in First-Person Accounts of Schizophrenia; Automated Linguistic and Network Analyses.Schizophrenia bulletin open · 2026Article
- Felt Presence and Psychosis Risk in the General Population.Psychopathology · 2026Article
- Loneliness in schizophrenia: Just loneliness.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Association between game addiction and lifetime psychotic-like experiences among high school students: a cross-sectional study.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Hearing voices and other altered perceptual experiences across psychotic, mood, and anxiety disorders: from phenomenology and mechanisms to future directions.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Review
- Visual hallucinations in Parkinson's disease are associated with deficits in social perception.Journal of Parkinson's disease · 2025Article
- The Relationship between Sense of Presence, Emotional Response, and Clinical Outcomes in Virtual Reality-Based Therapy for Treatment-Resistant Schizophrenia: An Exploratory Correlational Study.Journal of personalized medicine · 2024Article
- From Social Isolation to Social Justice: The Neuroscience of Solitary Confinement.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
- Felt presence and its determinants in young adults: results from three independent samples.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- The Relevance of Animal Models of Social Isolation and Social Motivation for Understanding Schizophrenia: Review and Future Directions.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
background and hypothesisThe social deafferentation hypothesis (SDA) has been proposed as an explanatory mechanism of hallucinations, based on the theory that social withdrawal triggers the initial phase of schizophrenia. The current study tests the SDA by assessing how loneliness is associated with different types of hallucinations. Under the SDA, increased loneliness is hypothesized to affect the occurrence of hallucinations that carry social meaning, but not of nonsocial hallucinations. STUDY
designAs part of an online survey, 2038 adolescents and young adults from the general population (median age 21 years; 75% female) filled out the Questionnaire for Psychotic Experiences, and the shortened De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale. Binomial logistic regression was used to investigate the effects of loneliness severity on past month prevalence of hallucinations, and on the presence of social versus nonsocial hallucinations. STUDY
resultsLoneliness increased the prevalence of hallucinations across modalities in the past month. Moreover, stronger degree of loneliness increased the likelihood of hearing voices or laughter, and of hallucinating being touched. Conversely, loneliness decreased the likelihood of experiencing the nonsocial hallucination of a tingling feeling. As expected, loneliness did not increase the prevalence of experiencing nonsocial hallucinations. Surprisingly, neither was loneliness associated with experiencing felt presence.
conclusionsOur results are novel in showing that loneliness specifically increases the likelihood of hearing human sounds such as voices or laughter, or feeling a human touch. Hallucinations without social meaning were not more likely to be experienced with increasing loneliness. This forms a confirmation of the SDA.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.