Reviews and Overviews Cognitive Neuropsychiatric Models of Persecutory Delusions

Objective: The major cognitive theories of persecutory delusion formation and maintenance are critically examined in this article. Method: The authors present a compre-hensive review of the literature, citing re-sults of relevant functional neuroimaging and neural network studies. Results: People with persecutory delu-sions selectively attend to threatening in-formation, jump to conclusions on the basis of insufficient information, attribute negative events to external personal causes, and have difficulty in envisaging others ’ intentions, motivations, or state