Year: 2001
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Psychotic delusions, defined as false immutable culturally discordant beliefs, constitute an endemic symptom among patients with schizophrenia.We examined whether the deficits in reasoning responsible for the formation and maintenance of delusions are a product of inappropriate discrimination between relevant and irrelevant data or rather the product of inappropriate processing from data that is appropriately relevant.We used a Logical Reasoning Task that presents items that test inferences and the choice of relevant information within two separate sections, one of which uses language designed to be affect-neutral, the other of which uses language with violent imagery that is designed to be affect-laden.Our preliminary results indicate that all patient groups show significant deficits on the types of reasoning that we measured, relative to healthy controls.While non-delusional patients also showed deficits in reasoning, delusional patients were unique in that their performance on reasoning tasks was most similar to that of healthy individuals as long as the context was affect-neutral.In the affect-laden contexts, however, delusional patients' reasoning significantly declined, while healthy individuals' performance was only mildly affected.We suggest that delusional patients may suffer from a vulnerability to arousal which causes them to commit types of reasoning errors similar in kind to those made by healthy controls under much more severe forms of stress.
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2624121335