Persecutory delusions: a review of theories and evidence based studies

Abstract

The account for delusional beliefs, particularly persecutory beliefs, has been at the centre of much controversy over the last two decades. The present paper summarizes and integrates the existing literature on this topic and starts by briefly describing the first few theories that explained paranoia, moving later to a more detailed evidence based description of the two most recent accounts for paranoia. These are Trower and Chadwick’s theory (1995) and Bentall et al.’s (2001) Attribution-Self-Representation model. More studies looking further into the dynamics of delusional beliefs are needed to utterly understand both the development and maintenance of paranoia.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17575/rpsicol.v20i2.394