What can science reveal about mediums who hear voices?
24 January, 2021
Researchers experience investigated what characterizes persons who say they can hear the voices of the dead.
Spiritualism is a motion whose adherents assume that the spirits of deceased people continue to go on after physical death.
Mediums declare that they have the ability to talk to the spirits through looking at (“clairvoyant”), feeling (“clairsentient”), or perhaps hearing (“clairaudient”) them.
Research from the Universities of Cardiff, Northampton, and Lancaster - all of which are in britain - have got argued that religious and spiritual activities (RSEs), such as clairaudience, can be useful as a assessment to auditory hallucinations of folks with certain mental health conditions.
The ‘clairaudient’ experience
A new analysis, which appears in the journal Mental Health, Religion & Way of life, examined links between auditory spiritual communications experienced by mediums, beliefs, and personality.
The study was the main Hearing the Voice project. Dr. Adam J. Powell, of the Division of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham in the U.K, and Dr. Peter Moseley, of the Section of Psychology at Northumbria University, as well in the U.K., completed the study.
“Spiritualists tend to survey unusual auditory experience [that] are positive, begin early in life, and [that] they are often then in a position to control,” explains Dr. Moseley. “Understanding how these develop is important because it may help us understand even more about distressing or non-controllable experience of hearing voices as well.”
How to examine the clairaudient experience
The researchers recruited 65 spiritualist participants, and also 143 other individuals to act as a general population control group. Just about all came from the U.K., North America, Australasia, and Europe.
The team asked the participants to complete tailored versions of online questionnaires that are recognized to determine various traits consistently.
These questionnaires were:
- The Tellegen Absorption Level: This uses yes/no questions to measure how likely one is to become fully immersed in internal and external stimuli-like films, mental imagery, music, or thoughts. That is also known as proneness to absorption.
- The Revised Launay-Slade Hallucination Level: This assesses a participant’s tendency to see auditory and visual hallucinations.
- The Revised Paranormal Beliefs Scale: This assesses participants’ perception of traditional religious beliefs, psi (extrasensory perception and capability to influence physical entities without interaction), witchcraft, superstition, extraordinary life forms, precognition (the opportunity to see the future), and Spiritualism.
- The Areas of Identity Questionnaire IV: This assesses the participants’ self-identified importance of personal identity, relational identity, social identity, and collective identity.
Participants found in the spiritualist group also completed a good questionnaire about how exactly often, found in what contexts, and for how long their encounters have been occurring.
Frequency, context, and location
The average age of which the spiritualist participants first had a clairaudient experience was 21.7 years, but a lot of people experienced it either prior to the age of 20 or around the age of 40.
As many as 44.6% of the respondents explained that that they had clairaudient experience daily, and 33.8% reported having had such an go through the day before.
In terms of where these experience were taking place, 79% of the participants said that that they had them both in spiritualist adjustments (such as for example in a church) and outside the house such settings.
A total of 12.9% of participants said that their experiences occurred only outside spiritualist contexts, while another 8.1% reported experiencing clairaudience only within spiritualist contexts.
Also, in line with the studies, 65.1% of clairaudient activities occurred inside medium’s head, 31.7% manifested both internally and externally, and 3.2% were allegedly external experience only.
As for the first occurrence of a good clairaudient experience:
- Of all the participants, 44.8% said that they experienced clairaudience before encountering Spiritualism.
- Of all the individuals, 29.3% said that they encountered Spiritualism before they experienced clairaudience.
- Of all the participants, 25.9% said that their first connection with clairaudience occurred as well as their first encounter with Spiritualism.
Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com
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