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Sean A Spence

Publications and source records attributed to Sean A Spence.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed2003

Defining thought broadcast. Semi-structured literature review.

BACKGROUND: The symptom of thought broadcast may have diagnostic significance but its definition varies. AIMS: To examine multiple definitions of thought broadcast in different texts, to synthesise their common features and to undertake local and national surveys of psychiatrists to determine which definitions they endorse. METHOD: A semi-structured literature review of electronic databases, supplemented by a manual search of psychiatric textbooks, conceptual analyses and postal surveys of clinicians in North Trent (58 trainees and 70 consultants) and throughout the UK (49 professors of general adult psychiatry). RESULTS: Thought broadcast is susceptible to multiple definitions: three exemplars were identified in the literature, each endorsed by influential authors. Among those psychiatrists responding to the survey (approximately 59%), some endorsed each definition of thought broadcast. CONCLUSIONS: Thought broadcast means different things to different people. Inconsistent terminology might impair communication in clinical and research contexts.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2003

Laterality effects in perceived spatial location of hallucination-like voices.

Aydin and colleagues reported a reversal of physiological 'right-ear advantage' in a group of right-handed patients with schizophrenia, using an auditory acuity test. In schizophrenia, auditory hallucinations may appear to be spatially located inside or outside the patient's head. Here we show, using virtual acoustic space techniques, that normal right-handed subjects have a right-ear advantage for correctly locating the 'source' of hallucination-like voices as from either inside or outside the head. We propose a model for understanding lateralised, external hallucinations in schizophrenia based upon reversal of normal cortical asymmetry for auditory spatial processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Sex and personality traits influence the difference between time taken to tell the truth or lie.

A necessary component of lying is the withholding of a truthful response. Hence, lying may be conceptualised as involving the inhibition of an initial, automatic response (the truth) while an alternative response (the lie) is generated. We investigated response times to visually and auditorially presented questions probing recent episodic memory, when subjects answered questions truthfully or with lies. We also investigated whether the absolute response times or difference between time taken to tell the truth or lie was affected by participants' sex or correlated with personality scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised-Short Scale. 61 subjects answered the same 36 questions five times. The first time involved answering all questions truthfully, which allowed post hoc analysis of whether subjects had been consistent in their lying and truth-telling on the following four occasions. These latter four occasions involved answering all questions (one each with 'truth' or 'lie') for both types of presentation. Regardless of type of presentation or subjects' sex, subjects took approximately 200 msec. longer to lie than to tell the truth in response to each question (p<.001). There were significant correlations between truthful response times to auditorially presented questions and Eysenck 'Neuroticism' scores. There was also a significant correlation for women between mean individual lie-minus-truth time to auditorially presented questions and Eysenck 'Lie' scores. These preliminary data suggest that response time is systematically longer when telling a lie and that personality variables may play a part in this process.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Alien motor phenomena: a window on to agency.

INTRODUCTION: Alien motor phenomena arise in neurological and psychiatric contexts and are likely to implicate several distributed brain systems. METHOD: A selective literature review, focusing on cognitive neurobiological accounts of alien/anarchic limb, somatoparaphrenia, and delusions of alien control (passivity phenomena); supplemented by an account of the cognitive neuroanatomy of action and agency (subjective sense of causation) in the normal state. RESULTS: Alien motor phenomena reflect impairments of agency through at least two mechanisms. (1) A disinhibition of ''lower'' motor centres giving rise to relatively stereotypic and contextually inappropriate motor routines (as emerge following medial frontal and corpus callosal lesions). (2) A disturbance of the perception of self-initiated movement, so that control of movement (causation) is attributed to an alien entity (phenomena associated with right parietal lobe lesions, focal epilepsy, and hyperactivity in acute schizophrenia). CONCLUSION: Whereas alien/anarchic limb dysfunction may be relatively easily explained in cognitive neurobiological terms, a comprehensive account of alien control will require further empirical ingenuity. Current models invoke disturbed feed-forward mechanisms, imitation, and the sense of another's agency (''nonself attribution'').

Journal Article↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Voices in the brain.

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Journal Article↗