There is controversy whether associations between psychosis and violence are due to coexisting substance misuse and factors increasing risk in nonpsychotic persons. Recent studies in clinical samples have implicated independent effects of paranoid delusions. Research findings suggest that individual psychotic-like-experiences on the psychosis continuum in the general population are associated w...

The frequently seen side effect of hyperprolactinemia thought to be the 'price' paid for the antipsychotic treatment of schizophrenia. Various reports have linked the use of risperidone, an atypical antipsychotic drug, with the significant rise of prolactin levels. Thus, we set to assess possible difference between prolactin levels among schizophrenia subtypes in 45 male patients treated with s...

Many studies have found that people experiencing persecutory delusions have a marked tendency to use external-personal attributions when establishing the causes of negative events. Although nonclinical populations also tend to attribute negative events to external causes, those causes are typically believed to be universal in nature, rather than personal. The central goal of the present study w...

Cognitive studies of patients with Schizoaffective Disorder typically indicate that the cognitive function of these patients resembles that of patients with Schizophrenic Disorder more than it does patients with nonpsychotic Mood Disorder. In this study patients with Schizoaffective Disorder were compared with patients with Paranoid, Undifferentiated and Residual clinical subtypes on a number o...

Whether avoidant personality disorder symptoms are related to neurocognitive impairments that aggregate in relatives of schizophrenics is unknown. We report the relationship between avoidant personality disorder symptoms and neurocognitive performance in the first-degree relatives of probands with schizophrenia. 367 first-degree relatives of probands with schizophrenia and 245 relatives of comm...

Using gaze information to orient attention and guide behavior is critical to social adaptation. Previous studies have suggested that abnormal gaze perception in schizophrenia (SCZ) may originate in abnormal early attentional and perceptual processes and may be related to paranoid symptoms. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), this study investigated altered early attentional and percept...

Psychiatric symptoms associated with hypothyroidism are well recognised. The common mental manifestations are slowness and difficulty in apprehension, thought and action; psychomotor retardation with indecision and listlessness suggestive of a depressive syndrome.' ,2 What is perhaps less well recognised is that patients with hypothyroidism may also present with marked irritability, paranoid id...

Based on clinical experience, anecdotal reports, and past empirical and conceptual work, we predicted that when people with narcissistic tendencies experience depressive symptoms, they are prone to develop paranoid attitudes. Moreover, we expected that this process was unidirectional, and that the combination of paranoid tendencies and depressive symptoms would not be associated with an increas...

This study examined whether paranoid beliefs are associated with instability of self-esteem (SE) as hypothesized by Bentall et al. [Bentall, R. P., Corcoran, R., Howard, R., Blackwood, N., & Kinderman, P. (2001). Persecutory delusions: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 21, 1143–1192] in a community-based sample. Measures assessing SE, SE instability, paranoid ide...

The maxn algorithm (Luckhardt and Irani, 1986) for playing multiplayer games is flexible, but there are only limited techniques for pruning maxn game trees. This paper presents other theoretical limitations of the maxn algorithm, namely that tie-breaking strategies are crucial to maxn, and that zerowindow search is not possible in maxn game trees. We also present quantitative results derived fr...