We explored the psychometric properties of the Korean version of the Peters et al. delusions inventory-21 (PDI-21) and evaluated the item characteristics of the PDI-21 compared with the Magical Ideation Scale (MIS) in Korean community adolescents. Survey participants comprised 310 Year 10 students who were assessed with the following instruments: the PDI-21, the MIS, the Schizotypal Personality...

INTRODUCTION Mirrored-self misidentification is the delusional belief that one's reflection in the mirror is a stranger. Current theories suggest that one pathway to the delusion is mirror agnosia (a deficit in which patients are unable to use mirror knowledge when interacting with mirrors). This study examined whether a hypnotic suggestion for mirror agnosia can recreate features of the delusi...

THE remarkable claims made in Nature (333,816; 1988) by Dr Jacques Benveniste and his associates are based chiefly on an extensive series of experiments which are statistically ill-controlled, from which no substantial effort has been made to exclude systematic error, including observer bias, and whose interpretation has been clouded by the exclusion of measurements in conflict with the claim t...

The body of knowledge on delusional parasitosis incriminates “delusional patients” as having imaginary external and/or internal symptoms that feel like parasite movements, dismisses them as psychiatric cases, and confuses cause with effect. We are critical of these arguments and believe that the symptoms of crawling and pin-pricking are genuine; just misinterpreted as parasite movements. Based ...

The paper introduces the idea that the human brain may apply complex mathematical modules in order to process and understand the world. We speculate that the substrate of what appears outwardly as intuition, or prophetic power, may be a mathematical apparatus such as time-delay embedding. In this context, predictive accuracy may be the reflection of an appropriate choice of the embedding parame...

A multifactorial model of the formation and maintenance of persecutory delusions is presented. Persecutory delusions are conceptualized as threat beliefs. The beliefs are hypothesized to arise from a search for meaning for internal or external experiences that are unusual, anomalous, or emotionally significant for the individual. The persecutory explanations formed reflect an interaction betwee...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Biased processing of negatively valenced, and particularly threat-related material plays an important role in the development of paranoid thinking. This has been demonstrated by superior memory for threat-related information in patients with persecutory delusions and in non-clinical paranoia-prone participants. This study examined how emotional material was recalled ha...

Objectives: New cognitive theories of delusions have proposed that deficit or bias in inference stage (a stage of normal belief formation) is significant in delusion formation. The aim of this study was predicting the severity of delusions based on jumping-to-conclusion bias in patients with schizophrenia. Methods: The sample consisted of 60 deluded patients with schizophrenia w...