What Are Delusions of Reference?

Delusion of special significance. Patients think that ordinary things around them not only have a relationship with themselves, but also have special meanings. Delusion of special significance is one of the common clinical symptoms of delusion, which can be regarded as the development situation of relational delusion. ^[1]

Delusion of special significance. The patient thinks that the words and actions of the people around him and daily actions are not only related to him, but also have a special meaning.

For example, when a male patient came home, he saw his wife teasing his child and rolled boiled eggs. He said, "Get off, get off." After hearing this, the patient was displeased. His wife didn't know that he had peeled one. Half of the pears were distributed to the patients. The patients immediately became furious and said, "It is not so easy to divorce me," and many people's persuasion was invalid.

The delusion of special meaning can be regarded as the development situation of delusion of reference. Relationship delusion means that the patient thinks that the environment has nothing to do with him. For example: people talking about him talk about him, others spit is contempt of him. Every move of others has something to do with him.

After an early trauma event, patients will think repeatedly over a period of time, and these repeated thinking will make them form a certain cognitive structure (schema, that is, a more stable assumption of themselves and the world). These cognitive structures seem to be forgotten over time, but they are actually submerged into the subconscious and internalized into their personality, making patients tend to take too much attention, evaluate and Explaining similar incidents has formed the susceptibility to relationship delusions (such as personality traits such as sensitivity and paranoia). These cognitive structures play a decisive role in the occurrence of relationship delusions. Although they are usually not expressed, they are just a latent tendency, but they can unknowingly affect the patient's cognition, emotions, behaviors, and the way things are handled. These underlying cognitive structures (schema, or dysfunctional hypothesis) may also be activated by some major life events in the future. Once activated (self-referencing effect), patients have a large number of negative automatic thoughts. . The content of a negative automatic thought is often a negative awareness of the current event, or it may be a negative connection or explanation of past experience, or a negative expectation or worry about the development of future events. Negative automatic thoughts are always related to unpleasant emotions. They always appear suddenly in people's minds. They are not the products of careful thinking, but the products of past experience after a little processing. It is these constant and repeated reinforcement of negative automatic thoughts, and later patients' repeated "self-justification" and "
"Systematization", in the end, makes those "skeptical" (such as implicated ideas, fragmentary delusions, delusional perceptions, delusional bursts) that are still questionable at first, gradually becoming "objective facts" that make them believe unquestionably ^2] (ie relationship delusions, which in turn may trigger delusions of special meaning).