Abstract
An experiment was conducted to examine recall bias in patients suffering from persecutory delusions, depressed controls, and normal subjects. Subjects were given a mixed list of threat-related, depression-related, and emotionally neutral words which they were asked to recall immediately afterwards. Deluded patients recalled fewer words overall than the normal subjects, and showed a recall bias toward both threat-related and depression-related words. The deluded subjects also showed a significant tendency to repeat threat-related words during recall. These biases were not significantly related to levels of depressive symptomatology or magical ideation in the deluded patients. Depressed patients showed a recall bias toward depression-related words only, and showed no significant tendency to repeat either depression-related or threat-related words. The findings are interpreted in the light of cognitive accounts of persecutory delusions.
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This research was supported by a grant to Dr. Bentall from the Wellcome Trust for the study of cognitive processes in psychotic symptomatology.
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Bentall, R.P., Kaney, S. & Bowen-Jones, K. Persecutory delusions and recall of threat-related, depression-related, and neutral words. Cogn Ther Res 19, 445–457 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02230411
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02230411