Schizophrenia involves profound but enigmatic disturbances of affective or emotional life. The affective responses as well as expression of many patients in the schizophrenia spectrum can seem odd, incongruent, inadequate, or otherwise off-the-mark. Such patients are, in fact, often described in rather contradictory terms: as being prone both to exaggerated and to diminished levels of emotional...

We report on a woman with first-episode schizophrenia with grandiose delusions. She developed a bizarre delusion that she was 'Jesus', who had special powers to talk to animals and predict the future. The grandiose delusions were maintained by her positive emotions, positive imagery of becoming an extraordinary person, and cognitive biases. With the application of cognitive and affective model ...

Metacognitive training for patients with schizophrenia (MCT) is a novel form of psychotherapy that aims to promote insight into the relationship between metacognitive deficits and psychotic symptoms, especially delusions. MCT has been found to be effective in reducing the delusional conviction and other positive symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. However, we are not aware of any research ...

Deficits in emotion-based learning are implicated in many psychiatric disorders. Research conducted with patients with schizophrenia using one of the most popular tasks for the investigation of emotion-based learning, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), has largely been inconclusive. The present study employed a novel, contingency-shifting variant IGT with hallucination- and delusion-prone university...

BACKGROUND This experiment examines two aspects of delusional cognition that have been reported clinically but not investigated empirically. These are the incorporation of potentially conflicting information into the recall of delusion-related scripts and the type and amount of material produced additional to that presented for recall, referred to here as confabulation. METHODS Three groups o...

The hypothesis that persecutory delusions function to enhance self-esteem implies that patients will show normal explicit, but low implicit self-esteem. As evidence for this has been inconsistent, our study assessed delusional state, explicit and implicit self-esteem and depression in a large sample (n=139) of schizophrenia patients with acute persecutory delusions (n=28), patients with remitte...

From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in...

BACKGROUND Nothing is known about the prevalence of delusional infestation in veterinary practice and the consequences for psychiatrists. AIMS We attempted to examine the frequency of delusional infestation among pet owners presenting their animals to veterinary clinics. METHOD We conducted a survey among 32 663 veterinary clinicians who were members of the Veterinary Information Network. ...

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...