Enhanced Verbal Statistical Learning in Glossolalia.

Glossolalia ("speaking in tongues") is a rhythmic utterance of word-like strings of sounds, regularly occurring in religious mass gatherings or various forms of private religious practices (e.g., prayer and meditation). Although specific verbal learning capacities may characterize glossolalists, empirical evidence is lacking. We administered three statistical learning tasks (artificial grammar, phoneme sequence, and visual-response sequence) to 30 glossolalists and 30 matched control volunteers. In artificial grammar, participants decide whether pseudowords and sentences follow previously acquired implicit rules or not. In sequence learning, they gradually draw out rules from repeating regularities in sequences of speech sounds or motor responses. Results revealed enhanced artificial grammar and phoneme sequence learning performances in glossolalists compared to control volunteers. There were significant positive correlations between daily glossolalia activity and artificial grammar learning. These results indicate that glossolalists exhibit enhanced abilities to extract the statistical regularities of verbal information, which may be related to their unusual language abilities.

Attribution of Mental States in Glossolalia: A Direct Comparison With Schizophrenia.

Glossolalia ("speaking in tongues") is a rhythmic utterance of pseudo-words without consistent semantic meaning and syntactic regularities. Although glossolalia is a culturally embedded religious activity, its connection with psychopathology (e.g., psychotic thought disorder and altered mental state attribution/mentalization) is still a matter of debate. To elucidate this issue, we investigated 32 glossolalists, 32 matched control participants, and 32 patients with schizophrenia using the Animated Triangle Test (ATT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). The ATT can detect hypo- and hypermentalization using animations of two moving triangles. Healthy adults describe these as random movements (e.g., bouncing), willed actions (e.g., playing), or they mentalize (e.g., tricking). We found that glossolalists provided more mentalizing descriptions in the ATT random and intentional movement animations relative to the control participants. They also recognized more mental states in the RMET than the controls. None of them had a diagnosis of mental disorders. In contrast, patients with schizophrenia hypermentalized only in the ATT random movement condition, whereas they showed hypomentalization in the ATT intentional movement condition and in the RMET relative the control subjects. Hypermentalization in the ATT positively correlated with intrinsic religiosity in the glossolalia group. In conclusion, our results demonstrated a substantial difference in the mentalizing ability of glossolalists (generalized hypermentalization) and patients with schizophrenia (both hypo- and hypermentalization).

[Religious-spiritual crisis or psychosis? The impact of basic symptoms in the differentiation of prepsychotic states].

Religious-spiritual crises include distress associated with the weakening or loss of faith, turbulent conversions, and affective states associated with negative spirituality. The differential diagnosis in regard to psychosis is often challenging. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of basic symptoms (changes in the subjective experience of perception, thinking, feeling, and self) in the differential diagnosis. We evaluated 106 help-seeking individuals with the Bonn Scale for the Assessment of Basic Symptoms (BSABS). The results indicated that religiousspiritual crises and psychotic states could be properly differentiated with the BSABS. Although the crisis and psychosis groups scored similarly on perplexity, self-disorder, depression, and anxiety, the disturbance of social contact and cognition was observed only in psychosis. These results indicate that the assessment of basic symptoms is useful in the differentiation of religious-spiritual crisis and psychosis, but it does not replace a multidisciplinary approach when, in addition to the routine psychiatric examination, the wider cultural context and the personal narratives are also considered.