Seattle University Collaborative Projects - International Academy of ...

The evidence suggests that people with schizophrenia have dysfunctional empathy. Intactempathy has been associated with prosocial behaviour and has been considered a protectivefactor against antisocial behaviour and violence. The dysfunction of the components of empathymight play a role in the pathway to violence among people with schizophrenia and its furtherinvestigation may be worthy.Data from an ongoing longitudinal multicentre study would be presented. This data wouldinclude sociodemographic and psychopathological information from patients with psychosisrecently admitted to both forensic and general psychiatric settings. Self reported empathy andrecent violent episodes during the time of admission are explored among two subgroups ofpatients clustered according the frequency and severity of their historical violence. Preliminaryresults on empathy and recent violence differences between the two subgroups would bepresented. The clinical and legal implications of this study would be discussed.Persecutory Ideations and Delusional Distress in Relation to Aggression and aDimensional View of Psychotic Symptoms/Models in the General PopulationJosanne D.M. van Dongen, Erasmus University of Rotterdam (j.d.m.vandongen@law.eur.nl)Background: People with schizophrenia are more likely to be violent than the people without.Feeling driven to act on persecutory delusions may be one explanation for this, but it remainsunclear why some should act on such delusions but some not. Acquisition of data from peoplewho are very ill is problematic. Our study explores testing of hypotheses on similar ideationaland behavioural associations among healthy recruits from the general population. Aims: To testthe effect of distress induced by persecutory ideas on any relationships between those ideas andaggressive behaviour, and the effect of gender.Method: Twenty-four men and 53 women from the general population participated in this study.The measures of aggressive behaviour were experimentally induced aggressive responding andself-reported personal style, reactive, and proactive aggressive behaviours.Results: Among men, persecutory ideation predicted reactive aggressive responding andaggressive style of behaviour only in those who experienced higher levels of persecutoryideational distress. Among women, with generally lower levels of aggression, the role ofideational distress was more complicated; higher levels of distress mediated against reactiveaggression but were linked to aggressive style. For neither men nor women were there linksbetween persecutory ideation and proactive aggression, regardless of distress.Conclusions: The apparent similarity of associations between persecutory ideation, the distress itmay cause and some forms of aggression to associations between persecutory delusions, thedistress they may cause and actual physical violence, are encouraging for the use of such.118