There are studies showing that in schizophrenia, stress factors could trigger or exacerbate psychotic symptoms. We assumed that stress will increase the level of worry to those who initially had low scores on PSWQ scale, with major impact on persecutory delusion, as well as affecting cognitive performance. Between January 2011 and December 2011, 120 patients with schizophrenia wanted to partici...

OBJECTIVE Acting on delusions is a significant clinical issue. The concept of safety behaviours--actions carried out with the intention of reducing perceived threat--provides a new way of understanding acting on delusions. A study was conducted with the aim of examining the prevalence and correlates of safety behaviours related to persecutory delusions. METHOD One hundred patients with persec...

BACKGROUND Worry is a significant problem for individuals with paranoia, leading to delusion persistence and greater levels of distress. There are established theories concerning processes that maintain worry but little has been documented regarding what brings worry to a close. AIMS The aim was to find out what patients with persecutory delusions report are the factors that bring a worry epi...

  Introduction: Hypothyroidism is a common disorder of the endocrine system in which the production of thyroid hormones is inadequate. In addition to various physical manifestations, patients who suffer from hypothyroidism may also present with psychological problems, as described in previous studies. Case Presentation: Herein, the reports of 2 pati...

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...

A cardinal feature of schizophrenia is the poor comprehension, or misinterpretation, of the emotional meaning of social interactions and events, which can sometimes take the form of a persecutory delusion. It has been shown that the comprehension of the emotional meaning of the social world involves a midline paralimbic cortical network. However, the function of this network during emotional ap...

OBJECTIVES Selective processing of emotion-relevant information is considered a central feature in various types of psychopathology, yet the mechanisms underlying these biases are not well understood. One of the first steps in processing information is to gather data to judge the covariation or association of events. The aim of this study was to explore whether patients with persecutory delusio...

The current debate about the diagnostic significance of delusion revolves around two positions. The neurocognitive position conceives delusion as a non-specific, though polymorphic, symptom. The psychopathological position views features of delusion such as content and structure as having meaningful connections with diagnostic entities. This study aims at contributing to this debate by examinin...