Development of the Visual Hallucination Questionnaire (6D-VHQ)

Most questionnaires about hallucinations focus on whether a person has hallucinated and what occurred alongside the experience, but few, if any, ask about the content of the hallucination itself.

To fill this gap, we developed and validated the 6-Dimensional Visual Hallucination Questionnaire (6D-VHQ), which measures the content of visual hallucinations across six dimensions: geometric content, semantic content, vividness, complexity, focality, and detail level.

We have collected data from psychedelic and stroboscopic hallucinations which show high internal and face validity. Preliminary analyses were recently presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the British Neuropsychological Society in London, with a paper soon to come.

If you are interested in using this questionnaire, please get in touch at: t.hewitt (at) sussex.ac.uk