Chronic persecutory delusion and autobiographical memories in patients with schizophrenia: a diary study

Abstract

Background: While chronic persecutory delusions are typically anchored into patients' everyday life situations, no investigation has ever looked at how situations associated with a feeling of persecution are recorded and later retrieved.

Method: a diary methodology combined with a recognition task involving ten patients with schizophrenia who presented chronic persecutory delusions and ten control participants. Diaries of everyday persecutory events (Pe) and non-persecutory events (nPe) were kept.

Results: in both groups, 1) Pe were associated with higher anxiety scores than nPe, 2) Pe were experienced as less distinctive and more stereotyped than nPe, 3) the frequency of incorrect recognition of altered descriptions of Pe was higher than that of nPe.

Limitations: because high levels of motivation are required of the diarists, our sample size was small.

Conclusion: Memories of persecutory events were highly emotional and semanticized. they were frequently incorrectly recognized, suggesting the existence of bias resulting from interactions between their processing and persecutory delusions.