Phenomenological and neurocognitive perspectives on delusions: A critical overview.
World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) June 1, 2015 Louis Sass, Greg Byrom 94 citations
Phenomenological accounts of delusions, especially in schizophrenia, emphasize disturbances in minimal self-experience (ipseity) and hyperreflexivity, while neurocognitive models stress salience dysregulation and prediction error. This paper reviews major phenomenological perspectives from Jaspers, Matussek, and Conrad, noting consistencies with neurocognitive approaches but also reservations about homogenizing tendencies that treat all delusions as mistaken beliefs about objective facts. The authors suggest that current neurocognitive models emphasizing hypersalience—where banal stimuli feel strange—may be complemented by considering hyposalience, where strange experiences feel banal, possibly linked to default mode network activation. Hyposalience could foster a derealized 'anything goes' attitude conducive to delusion formation, differing from the hypersalience focus in existing theories.