COGS101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Agnosia, Autonomic Nervous System, Face Perception
2 Jun 2018
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Delusions:
What are delusions?
• Delusional belief where individuals adopt beliefs that they should usually
reject
Different types of delusions:
• Mirrored-self misidentification
o The belief that when you are looking into a mirror, the person you see
there is not you, but some stranger who looks like you
o Example 1 – person T
o Example 2 – person F
o Example 3 – person MV
• Capgras delusion
o The belief that someone emotionally close to you, typically a family
member has been replaced by an imposter
o Several hundred cases reported in the literature since the first detailed
report by the French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras
• Cotard delusion
o The belief that you are dead
o Named after French psychiatrist Jules Cotard, who first described
delusion in 1980
• Fregoli delusion
o Belief that you are constantly being followed by people whom you
know but cannot recognize (as they are always in disguise)
o Condition is named after Italian actor Leopoldo Fregoli, who was
renowned for his ability to make quick changes of appearance during
his stage act
o P. Courbon and G. Fail first reported this condition in 1927
• Somatoparaphrenia
o Belief that part of your body belongs to someone else
o Two example conversations between patients with somatoparaphrenia
and experiments (look at transcripts)
• Alien control/passivity delusion
o Belied that other people can control the movements of parts of your
body
o Fairly common in schizophrenia
Importance features of all delusions:
• They can be monothematic → this may be the only odd belief that patient
expresses
• In one sense, there is insight → the patient is typically well aware of how odd
the belief seems to others/it is a strange belief (in an important sense though,
they do not have insight into the truth)
• The beliefs are encapsulated → the deluded person may not follow up on
obvious consequences e.g. contacting police regarding wife
• They are not rare → e.g. hundreds of cases of Capgras delusion reported
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