Langdon Robyn, Connaughton Emily, Coltheart Max
ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders (CCD), Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University.
Top Cogn Sci. 2014 Oct;6(4):615-31. doi: 10.1111/tops.12108. Epub 2014 Sep 13.
Fregoli delusion is the mistaken belief that some person currently present in the deluded person's environment (typically a stranger) is a familiar person in disguise. The stranger is believed to be psychologically identical to this known person (who is not present) even though the deluded person perceives the physical appearance of the stranger as being different from the known person's typical appearance. To gain a deeper understanding of this contradictory error in the normal system for tracking and identifying known persons, we conducted a detailed survey of all the Fregoli cases reported in the literature since the seminal Courbon and Fail (1927) paper. Our preliminary reading of these cases revealed a notable lack of definitional clarity. So, we first formulated a classification scheme of different person misidentification delusions so as to identify those cases that qualified as instances of Fregoli according to the above characterization: the mistaken belief that a known person is present in the environment in a different guise to his or her typical appearance. We identified 38 clear cases of this type and set out to answer a series of questions motivated by current hypotheses about the origin of the Fregoli delusion. We asked whether the patients misidentified particular strangers, made reference to the misidentified known persons using wigs or plastic surgery (or other techniques to disguise their appearance), misidentified many different strangers or only one, showed other symptoms (in particular, other misidentification delusions), and made inferences about the motives of the known persons in disguise. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for current hypotheses concerning the origin of the Fregoli delusion.
弗雷戈里妄想症是一种错误的信念，即认为处于妄想者周围环境中的某个人（通常是陌生人）是乔装打扮的熟人。尽管妄想者察觉到陌生人的外貌与熟人的典型外貌不同，但仍认为这个陌生人在心理上与那个不在场的熟人完全一样。为了更深入地理解在追踪和识别熟人的正常系统中出现的这种矛盾性错误，我们对自开创性的库尔邦和法伊尔（1927年）论文发表以来文献中报道的所有弗雷戈里病例进行了详细调查。我们对这些病例的初步研读发现，在定义的清晰度方面明显存在不足。所以，我们首先制定了一个不同身份误认妄想症的分类方案，以便确定那些根据上述特征可被认定为弗雷戈里病例的情况：即错误地认为某个熟人以与其典型外貌不同的伪装出现在周围环境中。我们识别出了38个这种类型的明确病例，并着手回答一系列由当前关于弗雷戈里妄想症成因的假说所引发的问题。我们询问患者是否误认了特定的陌生人、是否提到通过假发或整形手术（或其他改变外貌的技术）来伪装被误认的熟人、是误认了许多不同的陌生人还是只误认了一个、是否表现出其他症状（特别是其他身份误认妄想症），以及是否对伪装熟人的动机进行了推断。最后，我们讨论了研究结果对当前关于弗雷戈里妄想症成因假说的影响。
