Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) increase the risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders yet are common in the community. Some PLEs, such as those associated with depression, distress, and poor functioning, may confer increased risk. The aim of this study is to determine the prevalence of PLEs in a nonpsychotic clinical sample and to investigate whether any subtypes of PLEs are associ...

OBJECTIVE A number of cognitive biases have been identified relevant to persecutory thought (e.g. exaggerated self-serving bias). Moreover, findings of increased depressed mood in conjunction with high levels of self-esteem have contributed to theories of persecutory ideation (e.g. Bentall, Kinderman, Kaney, 1994). Using a nonclinical sample, the present study sought to expand upon previous res...

The exponential application of mobile technology has led to a concern about implications of electromagnetic radiation on human health. As we are aware that mobile phone radiates EMR when users communicate to others and that time subscribers of the device are regularly exposed nearby 40% 50% of total mobile irradiation. We analyzed the risk of “Ringing Delusion” among normal users, moderate user...

T he study of delusions has important implications for understanding the role played by affective processes on the road from experience to belief. it can also shed light on the forms of modularity these processes manifest. there are at least two different ways in which emotional processes may be relevant to the etiology of delusional beliefs. First, current models of delusion converge in propos...

Delusional people are people saying very bizarre things like they are dead, their spouse is a robot, the TV star is talking to them, they are possessed by the devil, aliens are following them, and so on. Even though we know that they are not identical, terms like “delusion” and “mental illness” are often used as synonyms in ordinary language. This comes from what psychopathology tradition hande...

Board & Chung [3] propose a class of structures (OBU structures) designed to model agents’ awareness of their own unawareness. In particular, OBU structures are capable of modeling an agent who is “not sure whether or not she is aware of everything”, without the implication that she does not know what she is aware of. In Board & Chung [3] (henceforth BC), OBU structures were used to provide sem...

BACKGROUND Capgras delusion is a delusional misidentification syndrome, in which the patient is convinced that someone that is well known to them, usually a close relative, has been replaced by an impostor or double. Although it has been frequently described in psychotic syndromes, including paranoid schizophrenia, over a third of the documented cases of Capgras delusion are observed in patient...

In the present paper, we look into what is painful psychical analgesia in relation to what 19 century clinicians have named “moral pain” in melancholia, and more particularly in the delusion of negation described by the French psychiatrist Jules Cotard in 1880, a form of delusion that can be seen mostly in cases of chronic anxious melancholia. This condition is characterized by a painful absenc...

Psychotic patients have problems with bodily self-recognition such as the experience of self-produced actions (sense of agency) and the perception of the body as their own (sense of ownership). While it has been shown that such impairments in psychotic patients can be explained by hypersalient processing of external sensory input it has also been suggested that they lack normal efference copy i...

INTRODUCTION Despite current research interest in delusional beliefs, there are no viable models for studying delusions in the laboratory. However, hypnosis offers a technique for creating transient delusions that are resistant to challenge. The aim of this study was to develop an hypnotic analogue of one important delusion, mirrored-self misidentification. METHODS Twelve high hypnotisable pa...