Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-20T20:31:07.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Abnormalities of self-representation and persecutory delusions: a test of a cognitive model of paranoia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Richard P. Bentall  and
Sue Kaney
Richard P. Bentall*
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Liverpool
Sue Kaney
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Liverpool
*
1Address for correspondence: Professor Richard Bentall, Department of Clinical Psychology, Whelan Building, University of Liverpool, PO Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Synopsis

Patients suffering from persecutory delusions exhibit information processing and social reasoning biases that have been hypothesized to have a self-protective function. In a test of this hypothesis, patients suffering from persecutory delusions who were also depressed and non-depressed deluded subjects were compared with depressed and normal controls on two indirect assessments of self-schemata: the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale (DAS) and incidental recall of negative and positive trait words that had previously been judged to be self-descriptive or not self-descriptive. Both the depressed subjects and the deluded subjects, whether or not they were depressed, scored highly on the DAS. Like normals, both depressed and non-depressed deluded subjects endorsed more positive than negative trait words as true of themselves whereas the depressed subjects endorsed as many negative as positive trait works. Like the depressed subjects, both groups of deluded subjects recalled as many of the negative words they had endorsed as positive words, whereas the normals remembered more positive words. No such bias was observed in subjects' recall of unendorsed words. The DAS results are interpreted as clearly consistent with a defensive model of persecutory delusions whereas the incidental recall data were equivocally so.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 26 , Issue 6 , November 1996 , pp. 1231 - 1237
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E. P. & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 78, 40–74.Google Scholar
American Psychiatric Association (1987). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – 3rd edn Revised. APA: Washington. DC.Google Scholar
Beck, A. T., Ward, C. H., Mendelson, M., Mock, J. & Erbaugh, J. (1961). An inventory for measuring depression. Archives of General Psychiatry 41, 53–63.Google Scholar
Bentall, R. P. & Kaney, S. (1989). Content-specific information processing and persecutory delusions: an investigation using the emotional Stroop test. British Journal of Medical Psychology 62, 355–364.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bentall, R. P., Kinderman, P. & Kaney, S. (1994). The self, attributional processes and abnormal beliefs: towards a model of persecutory delusions. Behaviour Research and Therapy 32, 331–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentall, R. P., Kaney, S. & Bowen-Jones, K. (1995). Persecutory delusions and recall of threat-related, depression-related and neutral words. Cognitive Therapy and Research 19, 445–457.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewin, C. (1988). Cognitive Foundations of Clinical Psychology. Lawrence Erlbaum: London.Google Scholar
Candido, C. L. & Romney, D. M. (1990). Attributional style in paranoid vs depressed patients. British Journal of Medical Psychology 63, 355–363.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clifford, P. I. & Hemsley, D. R. (1987). The influence of depression on the processing of personal attributes. British Journal of Psychiatry 150, 98–103.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Colby, K. M., Faught, W. S. & Parkinson, R. C. (1979). Cognitive therapy of paranoid conditions: Heuristic suggestions based on a computer simulation. Cognitive Therapy and Research 3, 55–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dent, J. & Teasdale, J. D. (1988). Negative cognition and the persistence of depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 97, 29–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dobson, K. S. & Shaw, B. F. (1986). Cognitive assessment with major depressive disorders. Cognitive Therapy and Research 10, 13–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobson, K. S. & Shaw, B. F. (1987). Specificity and stability of self-referent encoding in clinical depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 96, 34–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hammen, C. L., Marks, T., Mayall, A. & De Mayo, R. (1985). Depressive self-schemas, life stress and vulnerability to depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 94, 308–319.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hammen, C. L., Dyke, D. G. & Micklovitch, D. J. (1986). Stability and severity parameters of depressive self-schema responding. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 4, 23–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaney, S. & Bentall, R. P. (1989). Persecutory delusions and attributional style. British Journal of Medical Psychology 62, 191–198.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaney, S. & Bentall, R. P. (1992). Persecutory delusions and the self-serving bias. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 180, 773–780.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaney, S., Wolfenden, M., Dewey, M. E. & Bentall, R. P. (1992). Persecutory delusions and the recall of threatening and non-threatening propositions. British Journal of Clinical Psychology 31, 85–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinderman, P. (1994). Attentional bias, persecutory delusions and the self concept. British Journal of Medical Psychology 67, 53–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kinderman, P. & Bentall, R. P. (1996). Self-discrepancies and persecutory delusions: Evidence for a defensive model of paranoid ideation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105, 106–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, S. B., Loftus, J. & Burton, H. A. (1989). Two self-reference effects: the importance of distinguishing between self-descriptiveness judgements and autobiographical retrieval in self-referent encoding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56, 853–865.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuiper, N. A. & Olinger, L. J. (1986). Dysfunctional attitudes and the self-worth contingency model of depression. In Advances in Cognitive–Behavioural Research and Therapy (ed. Kendall, P. C.), pp. 115–142. Academic Press: New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuiper, N. A., Olinger, L. J. & Martin, R. A. (1988). Dysfunctional attitudes, stress and negative emotions. Cognitive Therapy and Research 12, 533–547.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyon, H. M., Kaney, S. & Bentall, R. P. (1994). The defensive function of persecutory delusions: evidence from attribution tasks. British Journal of Psychiatry 164, 637–646.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Myers, J. F., Lynch, P. B. & Bakal, D. A. (1989). Dysthymic and hypomanic self-referent effects associated with depressive illness and recovery. Cognitive Therapy and Research 13, 195–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, H. (1982). National Adult Reading Test Manual. NFER-Nelson: Windsor.Google Scholar
Olinger, L. J., Kuiper, N. A. & Shaw, B. F. (1987). Dysfunctional attitudes and stressful life events: an interactive model of depression. Cognitive Therapy and Research 11, 25–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A. & Kirker, W. S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, 677–688.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Silverman, J. S., Silverman, J. A. & Eardley, D. A. (1984). Do maladaptive attitudes cause depression? Archives of General Psychiatry 41, 28–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Simons, A. D., Garfield, S. L. & Murphy, G. E. (1984). The process of change in cognitive therapy and pharmacotherapy for depression. Archives of General Psychiatry 41, 45–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weissman, A. N. & Beck, A. T. (1978). Development and validation of the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale. Annual Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Chicago.Google Scholar
Williams, J. M. G. (1992). The Psychological Treatment of Depression, 2nd Edition. Routledge: London.Google Scholar
Williams, J. M. G., Healy, D., Teasdale, J. D., White, W. & Paykel, E. S. (1990). Dysfunctional attitudes and vulnerability to persistent depression. Psychological Medicine 20, 375–381.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zigler, E. & Glick, M. (1988). Is paranoid schizophrenia really camouflaged depression? American Psychologist 43, 284–290.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed