Understanding auditory verbal hallucinations: a systematic review of current evidence

Objective: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are core features of psychotic illness and remain significant in predicting poor outcome and risk. There has been a wide range of approaches to understanding these experiences.

Method: A systematic literature review summarizing different methods of investigation and their results; phenomenology, descriptive psychopathology, psychological, cognitive neurobiology, and neuroimaging.

Results: A number of 764 papers and texts were screened and 113 reviewed. Phenomenological studies are comparably few in number, and psychopathology remains based on concepts defined in the early 20th century. Psychological models focus on voice content and emotional reaction, and suggest a continuum of AVHs from normal experience. Neuropsychological models include AVHs as misattribution of inner speech, whilst functional neuroimaging studies focus on the spontaneous activity and connectivity of auditory networks.

Conclusion: There has been a large growth in research on AVHs in recent decades dominated by neurobiological and neuroimaging studies. Future research should include focus on phenomenological aspects and AVHs change over the course of developing illness. Integration between branches of enquiry is needed, and the risk is that without this, models are proposed and investigated that bear scant relevance to the symptom itself.