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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Psychological processes underlying delusional thinking in late-onset psychosis
— a preliminary investigation | | Author(s) | Yvonne McCulloch, Linda Clare, Rob Howard |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 21, no 8, August 2006 |
| Pages | pp 768-777 |
| Source | http://www.interscience.wiley.com |
| Keywords | Delusion ; Psychoses ; Self esteem ; Evaluation. |
| Annotation | It has been suggested that delusions may serve as a defence against negative self-representations. This cross-sectional study compared the performance and responses of 13 older people with late-onset psychosis, 15 with depression, and 15 age-matched healthy controls. Participants rated their own levels of depression and self-esteem, and completed an emotional Stroop task to establish whether there was evidence of implicit depression in the absence of explicit acknowledgement. Participants rated themselves on a number of personal attributes in relation to two life stages to generate discrepancies in "actual", "ideal" and "other" self-concepts, and completed measures of their perceptions of current and past psychological well-being. People with late-onset psychosis showed no evidence of overt depression or low self-esteem. All three groups showed an attentional bias to depression-related and age-related words, although response times overall were faster for controls. The psychosis group showed no discrepancies between either their past or their current "actual" and "other" self-concepts, suggesting that they do not have more negative views about how others see them. Evidence from this study does not support the application of the "delusion-as-defence" model to late-onset psychosis, but methodological constraints must be borne in mind when interpreting the findings. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-061024008 A |
| Classmark | EDD: EL: DPA: 4C |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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