Jumping to Conclusions Style along the Continuum of Delusions: Delusion-Prone Individuals Are Not Hastier in Decision Making than Healthy Individuals

Abstract

Literature comparing ‘jumping to conclusions’ (JTC) between patients and healthy controls has demonstrated the importance of the reasoning bias in the development of delusions. When groups that vary along the entire delusional continuum are included, the relationship between JTC and delusionality is less clear. This study compared JTC and delusional dimensions between 28 patients with delusions, 35 delusion-prone individuals and 32 non-delusion-prone individuals. Delusion proneness was defined by an established threshold based on the Peters et al. Delusions Inventory. Two versions of the beads task (85:15 and 60:40) were used to measure JTC. As hypothesized, patients manifested hastier data gathering than the two non-clinical groups on both beads tasks. However, delusion-prone individuals did not manifest a hastier decision making style than non-delusion prone individuals. Instead, non-delusion-prone participants showed more JTC bias than delusion-prone individuals on the easier beads task. There was no evidence for a dose-response relationship between JTC and delusional dimensions, with correlations between JTC and PDI scores found in the non-delusion-prone group only. The present finding confirms the link between an extreme JTC bias and the presence of clinical delusions, and argues against a linear relationship between JTC and delusionality along the symptomatic continuum.

Attentional focus moderates the relationship between attention to threat bias and delusion-like experiences in healthy adults

“…JTC and BIB did not correlate with the overall frequency of DLEs. The lack of relationship between JTC and DLEs has, however, already been detected in previous studies among healthy individuals [51,52], and is consistent with the suggestion that JTC is more closely related to clinically relevant delusions than to delusion-like experiences [20,53]. Similarly, some previous studies also demonstrated the lack of correlation between BIB and overall frequency of DLEs measured by PDI [21].…”

Data gathering ability contributes to visual organization and probabilistic reasoning

“…A departure from the literature is that our tasks were not correlated with the PDI, which is associated with jumping to conclusions in clinical ( Peters et al., 1999 , 2004 ) and non-clinical ( Colbert and Peters, 2002 ; So and Kwok, 2015 ) groups ( Ross et al., 2015 ). However, this is not universally consistent, as other studies have not found correlations between the PDI and DTD ( Lincoln, 2010 ; Ziegler et al., 2008 ).…”

Mindfulness and psychotic experiences in college students

“…The proportion of participants who answered affirmatively to seven or more items of the PDI-21was higher in this study than in that of Fonseca-Pedrero, Paino, Santarén-Rosell and Lemos Giráldez (2012) which was also conducted with university students. Other studies, such as that by So and Kwok (2015), found higher overall scores in non-clinical participants in the PDI-21 than those obtained in our study.…”