Percept Assimilation and Paranoid Severity

Mistrustful and Misunderstood: a Review of Paranoid Personality Disorder

“…A tendency towards a reasoning bias that jumps to conclusions has been a consistent and robustly replicated finding of empirical research in paranoia [87] [88]. This work must be interpreted in light of the severe thought disorder encountered in psychotic populations.…”

Delusional disorder and delusions: is there a risk of violence in social interactions about the core symptom?

“…The possibility that there are different routes to delusion formation has already been raised (Abroms et al, 1966;Brennan & Hemsley, 1984;Magaro, 1980). Hurn, Gray, and Hughes (2002) found, in a study that included offender patients with schizophrenia, that hypothetical contradiction of belief material had a differential effect on the belief(s) under challenge according to the principal mechanism apparently involved in belief formation.…”

“…Abroms, Taintor, and Lhamon (1966), for example, found that people with more paranoid/delusional presentations were more likely to make ''early perceptual hypotheses'', that is to jump to conclusions from external stimuli rather than to suspend judgement. Ross and Magaro (1976) tested for differences in cognitive style between people with paranoid schizophrenia, people with non-paranoid schizophrenia and healthy controls using a sentence completion task.…”

The Paranoid and the Schizophrenic: The Case for Distinct Cognitive Style

“…Often, they are, in their unfortunate madness, so ingenious in analyzing that which others unwittingly do, in order to explain it to their own satisfaction, that, if their data were only accurate, one would have to pay every tribute to their intelligence, [p. 15] Kant's emphasis on the unique phenomenology of paranoid cognition, or at least on its clear difference from schizophrenic experience, has been frequently repeated by clinicians and theoreticians. In describing the paranoid penchant for overinterpretation, Sullivan (1953) speaks of the "spread of meaning," Cameron (1951) of "sudden clarification," Bowers (1974) of a "press for meaning," Abrams, Taintor, andLhamon (1966) of a "metahypothesis," andYoung andJerome (1972) of "rigidity of internal representation/ 7 Best known, perhaps, is Cameron's (1959) description of the paranoid cognitive style of overinclusion, culminating in the (delusional) "pseudocommunity." He argued that the dynamics underlying the paranoid's creation of a separate conceptual world were distinguished from those motivating schizophrenic withdrawal.…”