Cognitive and social processes in psychosis: Recent developments

These two personal accounts contain key aspects of paranoia: the individuals are making judgements about other people; the decision-making is influenced by fear, worry, and unusual 'feelings'; and danger is anticipated. This is consistent with an emerging body of psychological research that implicates-in the context of the social world-reasoning processes, negative affect, and anomalous internal experiences in the occurrence of delusions. In this chapter the advances in the cognitive and social understanding of psychosis will be illustrated with reference to the clinically important experience of persecutory delusions, where arguably the progress has been most rapid. The initial application of this theoretical knowledge to clinical practice via an interventionist causal model approach will be described. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010.