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Wishful reality distortions in confabulation: a
case report
Fotopoulou A, Solms M, Turnbull O
Department of Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
aikaterini.fotopoulou@durham.ac.uk
Several theories have been proposed to account for the complex cognitive
mechanisms underlying the various forms and manifestations of confabulation. As
regards the content of confabulations, deficit accounts explain what is lacking
in the confabulations, but accounts of the positive features of the content may
also be required to explain what remains. There is reason to believe that the
content of confabulations is not motivationally neutral; in particular, they
appear to "improve" the world experienced by the patient, making it
more pleasant than the reality of the situation demands. The present study
investigated the content of the confabulations of a neurological patient, ES: a
56-year-old man, who developed a striking confabulatory syndrome following
removal of a meningioma in the pituitary and suprasellar region. ES's cognitive
abilities were severely compromised, and he confabulated continuously and
bizarrely. Raters presented with transcriptions of ES's confabulations found
them to represent significantly more pleasant experiences than their
corresponding, misrepresented realities. This finding suggests that
confabulations include motivated (or "wishful") content. The influence
of this motivational feature of confabulation must be considered in parallel
with the memory and executive deficits which contribute to the mechanism of
confabulation.
PMID: 15037052 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15037052
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