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Historically, however, engaging with ICs has been considered a cause for concern, and even a possible marker of future mental illness. Several studies have linked engagement with an IC to superior social cognition ( Taylor and Carlson, 1997 Roby and Kidd, 2008 Davis et al., 2011), while other studies have indicated that children with an IC are more creative ( Schaefer, 1969 Seiffge-Krenke, 1997 Hoff, 2005), more sociable ( Mauro, 1991), and capable of constructing more complex narratives ( Trionfi and Reese, 2009). Since research in this area adopted new methodological standards in the 1990s, ICs have been associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes ( Taylor, 1999). These characters can include invisible characters which nevertheless have an air of reality for the child ( Svendsen, 1934), and personified objects (imaginary beings that are embodied in a toy or object). ![]() These findings are consistent with the view that ICs represent a hallucination-like experience in childhood and adulthood which shows meaningful developmental relations with the experience of inner speech.īetween a third and two-thirds of young school-age children will engage with imaginary companions (ICs), defined as invisible characters with whom children converse and interact ( Taylor et al., 2004). The latter finding mirrored a pattern previously found in both clinical and nonclinical individuals with AVH. In addition to scoring higher on AVH proneness, individuals with a history of ICs showed reduced sensitivity to detecting speech in white noise as well as a bias toward detecting it. In the second study, a smaller community sample of adults ( N = 48) completed an auditory signal detection task as well as providing data on ICs and AVH. The results showed differences in inner speech phenomenology in individuals with a history of ICs, with higher scores on the Dialogic, Evaluative, and Other Voices subscales of the VISQ-R. In the first, a large community sample of adults ( N = 1,472) completed online the new Varieties of Inner Speech – Revised (VISQ-R) questionnaire ( Alderson-Day et al., 2018) on the phenomenology of inner speech, in addition to providing data on ICs and AVH. We present data from two studies on the relation between ICs in childhood and adulthood and the experience of inner speech. One line of research has explored how ICs might arise through the internalization of linguistically mediated social exchanges to form dialogic inner speech. Specifically, parallels have been drawn between the varied phenomenology of the two kinds of experience, including the issues of quasi-perceptual vividness and autonomy/control. Recent research has explored how the phenomenon of ICs in childhood and adulthood relates to the more unusual experience of hearing voices (or auditory verbal hallucinations, AVH). Interacting with imaginary companions (ICs) is now considered a natural part of childhood for many children, and has been associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes. ![]() 3School of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom.2Department of English Studies, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.1Department of Psychology, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.Charles Fernyhough 1 *, Ashley Watson 1, Marco Bernini 2, Peter Moseley 1,3 and Ben Alderson-Day 1
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