OBJECTIVE A dimensional approach to the characterization of delusions was used to examine the use of non-content-related descriptors of delusions in revealing differences across diagnostic categories and delusion types. METHOD Interviews with 1,136 acutely hospitalized psychiatric patients identified subjects as definitely or possibly delusional on the basis of screening questions derived fro...

Recent research has shown that negative emotional states of increased anxiety and sadness prospectively predict the occurrence of persecutory ideation, but it is not known whether these findings extend to other subtypes of delusions. The current study explored whether these negative emotional states, as well as hallucinations, biased reasoning style (ie, jumping to conclusions), and negative se...

Theoretical models postulate an important role of attributional style (AS) in the formation and maintenance of persecutory delusions and other positive symptoms of schizophrenia. However, current research has gathered conflicting findings. In a cross-sectional design, patients with persistent positive symptoms of schizophrenia (n = 258) and healthy controls (n = 51) completed a revised version ...

It has been proposed that an impairment in gaze determination is responsible for the paranoid symptoms reported in schizophrenia. To address this, we examined the gaze discrimination system in schizophrenia. Thirty-two patients suffering from schizophrenia (20 patients with persecutory delusions and 12 patients without such delusions) were compared to 32 control subjects on two specific tasks. ...

BACKGROUND Virtual reality provides a means of studying paranoid thinking in controlled laboratory conditions. However, this method has not been used with a clinical group. AIMS To establish the feasibility and safety of using virtual reality methodology in people with an at-risk mental state and to investigate the applicability of a cognitive model of paranoia to this group. METHOD Twenty-...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The cognitive models indicate that people with social phobia and paranoia share a common fear of others. While we recognize clinical differences, it is likely that some of the same psychological processes contribute to the maintenance of both presentations, yet the nature and extent of these similarities and differences are not yet clearly understood. This study explored thr...

The attributional style of outpatients with schizophrenia with and without persecutory delusions was investigated. Thirty individuals with schizophrenia were divided into persecutory-deluded and non-persecutory-deluded groups based on a score of 5 or higher on the suspiciousness item from the Expanded Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS-E). The two resulting groups, and a nonclinical control g...

This case report describes the progression of dysmorphophobic symptoms in the dimension of intensity from a normal age related concern, to primary dysmorpliophobia, to a somatic delusion during depressive and manic phases of a bipolar affective disorder. The depressive episodes were resistant to drug treatment but responded to ECTs.

This paper and its companion paper, Board & Chung [3], provide foundations for applied models of unawareness as seen in Tirole [24] and Chung & Fortnow [5]. In this paper, we provided a set-theoretic description of a general class of unawareness models called object-based unawareness structures, and present two applications. The first application provide a justification for the contra proferent...

BACKGROUND Although antipsychotic medication still represents the treatment of choice for schizophrenia, its objective impact on symptoms is only in the medium-effect size range and at least 50% of patients discontinue medication in the course of treatment. Hence, clinical researchers are intensively looking for complementary therapeutic options. Metacognitive training for schizophrenia patient...