Publications by authors named "Francesca Vitzthum"

Background: Metacognitive Group Training for Schizophrenia Patients (MCTg) focuses on dysfunctional thinking styles (e.g. cognitive biases) putatively involved in the formation and maintenance of delusions.

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The relation between religiosity/spirituality (R/S), personal beliefs, and mental health has been extensively studied. However, concerning anxiety disorders (ADs), empirical evidence is scarce. This study investigated the differences in R/S and magical/paranormal ideation among obsessive-compulsive disorder patients (OCD; n = 49), patients with other ADs (n = 36), and healthy controls (HCs; n = 35).

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Dysfunctions in social cognition are implicated in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and have been extensively replicated over the years. For memory research, the administration of cognitive tasks with metacognitive aspects like confidence ratings has deepened our insight into how impairments contribute to symptoms of the disorder. A total of 76 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and a sample of 30 healthy participants were tested with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (Eyes-test).

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Introduction: Previous studies confirmed a bias against disconfirmatory evidence (BADE) for both delusional and delusion-neutral events in paranoid schizophrenia. In the present study, we examined a potential relationship between the BADE and delusional ideation.

Methods: Fifty-five patients with schizophrenia (32 with current delusions), 20 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and 30 healthy participants were presented written scenarios composed of three successive sentences which increasingly disambiguated the situation.

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Purpose Of Review: Until recently, psychological therapy for schizophrenia was considered harmful or inefficient by many clinicians. The reservation against psychotherapy is partly rooted in the assumption that delusions in particular and schizophrenia in general are not amenable to psychological understanding and represent 'utter madness'. However, meta-analyses suggest that cognitive intervention is effective in ameliorating schizophrenia symptoms.

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