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...

Eighteen percent of Major Depressive cases attending a general hospital had delusions. There were 10 types of delusions and delusions of persecution occurred most frequently (67.5%), with persecution involving either the patients themselves or people close to them occurring in 50% each. The majority of patients considered the persecution to be unjustified and reacted by taking precautions, plea...

This study brings together the threat/control-override perspective and the literature on gender and stress coping to argue that gender moderates the association between threat delusions and violence. We suggest that men are more likely than women to respond to stressors such as threat delusions with violence. We test these ideas using data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, a mu...

A dangerous distortion of priorities seems to be currently apparent in the dominant approaches to major public health problems, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer and some infectious diseases. Relevant examples suggest an apparently inappropriate tendency to prioritise technocratic, partial solutions rather than confronting their true behavioural and structural determin...

The objectives of the present study were to examine the degree of co-existence of hallucinations and delusions in the nonclinical population. In addition, we wished to investigate the role of metacognitions in hallucinations and delusions. Finally, we explored the relative roles of positive and negative metacognitive beliefs in proneness to hallucinations and delusions. Three hundred and thirty...

Delusions are widely believed to reflect disturbed cognitive function, but the nature of this remains elusive. The "un-Cartesian" cognitive-linguistic hypothesis maintains (a) that there is no thought separate from language, that is, there is no distinct mental space removed from language where "thinking" takes place; and (b) that a somewhat broadened concept of grammar is responsible for besto...

People suffering from severe monothematic delusions, such as Capgras, Fregoli, or Cotard patients, regularly assert extraordinary and unlikely things. For example, some say that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. A popular view in philosophy and cognitive science is that such monothematic delusions aren’t beliefs because they don’t guide behaviour and affect in the way that belie...