Predicting paranoid thoughts in patients with schizophrenia basing on cognitive biases and self-reflection

Paranoid thoughts are common symptom in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Evidence reveals the role of cognitive factors in these thoughts.

The present study was conducted in other to predict the paranoid thoughts basing on cognitive biases and self-reflection in patients with schizophrenia.

The correlational method was used in this study. The whole patients with schizophrenia, hospitalized in Isar and Fatemi psychiatric hospitals of Ardabil city in the second half of 2017 year, comprised statistical population of this study. Among this population, One hundred and twenty six patients were selected by purposeful sampling method and participated in this study. Paranoid thoughts questionnaire, Davos Assessment of Cognitive Biases Scale and self-reflection and insight scale were used to gather data. The gathered data were analyzed by Pearson correlation and multivariate regression tests.

The correlational results showed that paranoid thoughts are positively related to Jumping to conclusions bias, belief inflexibility bias, attention for threat bias, external attribution bias, social cognition problems, subjective cognitive problems, safety behavior and total score of cognitive biases, but related negatively to insights and total score of self-reflection and insight. The results of regression analysis also showed that 57% of variance of the paranoid thoughts was explained by cognitive biases, and 36% of them explained by self-reflection and insight.

The results of this study demonstrated that cognitive biases in thoughts and low self-reflection can be predictive factors for paranoid thoughts in patients with schizophrenia. Thus, the cognitive interventions targeted these variables can be used to improve the paranoid thought in these patients.