Hallucinations are defined as

Hallucinations are defined as

• A. False sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus.
• B. A persistent fear of social situations.
• C. A cognitive bias that distorts memory.
• D. A period of elevated mood in bipolar disorder.

Answer: (A)

Hallucinations are false sensory experiences in which a person perceives something with a sense, such as sight or hearing, even though there is no external stimulus triggering it. You might, for example, see shapes or people that aren’t actually there or hear voices when no one is speaking. These experiences occur without any real input to provoke them and can involve any sense (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory). They’re different from misperceptions of real stimuli (illusions) and from thoughts or beliefs about reality. The other options describe things that are not perceptual experiences: a persistent fear of social situations is social anxiety; a cognitive bias that distorts memory is a memory or thinking error, not a perception; a period of elevated mood in bipolar disorder is mania, a mood state rather than a perceptual event.

Hallucinations are false sensory experiences in which a person perceives something with a sense, such as sight or hearing, even though there is no external stimulus triggering it. You might, for example, see shapes or people that aren’t actually there or hear voices when no one is speaking. These experiences occur without any real input to provoke them and can involve any sense (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory). They’re different from misperceptions of real stimuli (illusions) and from thoughts or beliefs about reality.

The other options describe things that are not perceptual experiences: a persistent fear of social situations is social anxiety; a cognitive bias that distorts memory is a memory or thinking error, not a perception; a period of elevated mood in bipolar disorder is mania, a mood state rather than a perceptual event.