Our Work
The Yale COPE Project is currently ongoing and still looking for participants. However, over the last few years, we have had so many wonderful participants who we are grateful for. Your responses and time spent on this study so far has already led to reportable results and published papers. As we find results and publish papers, they will be posted on this page.
Thank you for your continued efforts and support.
01
Measuring Voluntary Control Over Hallucinations: The Yale Control Over
Perceptual Experiences (COPE) Scales
Summary:
For many, hearing voices that others do not is a significant source of distress and dysfunction. Some voice-hearers, however, report that they can fully control the onset and offset of the voices, making them much less disruptive. Despite this apparent benefit of control, there were no available tools (surveys, tests, etc.) at the time of this study that allowed us to look in detail at the ways in which people control their voice-hearing experiences. Working with mental health advocates, researchers, and people with lived experience, we developed a set of questions with rating scales that reflect how much control people generally have with their voices and what kind of strategies they use to exert that control. We call this the Yale Control Over Perceptual Experiences (COPE) scale. This study involved narrowing down the questions of the COPE scale and making sure that the scale was reliably measuring what we wanted to measure. The scale and the rest of the survey data from the COPE Project was then used to show that higher levels of control were associated with better clinical outcomes and better quality of life for people with and without a psychosis-spectrum diagnosis. The COPE scale will provide future researchers, mental health professionals, and those in other relevant fields a standard way to measure control over voice hearing and other perceptual experiences. This is useful for developing and tracking interventions designed to improve control and quality of life for individuals who are struggling or seeking help managing these experiences.
02
Conditioned Hallucinations and Prior Hyper-Precision are State-Sensitive Markers of Hallucination Susceptibility
Summary:
What we see and hear depends both on the way we take in sights and sounds from our surroundings, and on our previous understanding and expectation about the world around us. People who hear voices and sounds that others don’t, or who describe themselves as having auditory hallucinations, seem to rely more strongly on their prior expectations than on the sights and sounds around them. The Conditioned Hallucinations (CH) task helps give us a sense of how much people are relying on their prior expectations versus the incoming sights and sounds. In order for this to be relevant for the help-seeking clinical population, it is important to understand whether the reliance on prior expectations in the CH task is related only to whether or not someone hears voices in general, or whether it can predict the increase (or decrease) of these experiences at specific time points. The findings from this study suggest that performance on the CH task does predict the frequency and intensity of voice-hearing experiences at specific points in time. In other words, someone who does the CH task and is relying a lot on their expectations may have frequent and intense voice-hearing experiences in the coming days. In a few weeks when they are having fewer of these experiences, the CH task will likely show less reliance on their expectations. This finding suggests that the CH task can be used to track symptom development in help-seeking individuals who experience auditory hallucinations as part of underlying illness. This can also allow for a more appropriate and targeted treatment response.