Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, Qc, Canada.
Psychiatry Res. 2011 Oct 30;189(3):433-9. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2011.06.018. Epub 2011 Jul 16.
Emotional distress and reasoning biases are two factors known to contribute to delusions. As a step towards elucidating mechanisms underlying delusions, the main aim of this study was to evaluate a possible "jumping to new conclusions" reasoning bias in healthy people with delusional ideation and its association with emotions. We surveyed 80 healthy participants, measuring levels of depression, anxiety, cognitive error and delusional ideation. Participants completed two versions of the beads task to evaluate their reasoning style. Results showed that people with delusional ideation reached a conclusion after less information, as expected. Interestingly, they also tended to change their conclusions more often than people without delusional ideation and did so with greater conviction. Depression and cognitive errors were strong predictors of delusional ideation but not of reasoning style. We conclude that delusional ideation in non-psychotic individuals is independently predicted by depressive symptoms and by a high conviction in new conclusions.
情绪困扰和推理偏差是已知导致妄想的两个因素。作为阐明妄想机制的一步，本研究的主要目的是评估有妄想观念的健康人群中是否存在“跳跃到新结论”的推理偏差，及其与情绪的关系。我们调查了 80 名健康参与者，测量了抑郁、焦虑、认知错误和妄想观念的水平。参与者完成了两个版本的珠子任务来评估他们的推理风格。结果表明，有妄想观念的人在信息较少的情况下得出结论，这是意料之中的。有趣的是，他们也比没有妄想观念的人更频繁地改变结论，而且改变结论时更加坚定。抑郁和认知错误是妄想观念的强烈预测因素，但不是推理风格的预测因素。我们得出结论，非精神病个体的妄想观念独立于抑郁症状和对新结论的高度确信。
