Deliri e allucinazioni: due patologie della credenza?

Delusions and hallucinations are the core features of schizophrenia. In this paper, I try to highlight the possible shared mechanisms of these two symptoms, focusing on monothematic delusions and auditory hallucinations. According to recent studies, an important role may be played by metacognition. Top down factors (like excess of self-focused attention, ruminative processing, attentional bias), rather than bottom up ones (perceptual anomalies due to neuropsychological deficits), seem to contribute to the formation and maintenance of both hallucinations and delusions. Even in auditory hallucinations, it seems that the experience of hallucinations alone doesn’t generally lead to psychosis, but is the development of beliefs about the hallucinations (e.g., attributing them to an external source and attributing special significance to them) which plays a key role in the development of psychosis. Therefore, these results seem to suggest that auditory hallucinations are, together with delusions, pathologies of belief.