Attributional style in a case of Cotard delusion.

Young and colleagues (e.g. Young, A. W., & Leafhead, K. M. (1996). Betwixt life and death: case studies of the Cotard delusion. In P. W. Halligan & J. C. Marshall (Eds.), Method in madness: Case studies in cognitive neuropsychiatry. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.) have suggested that cases of the Cotard delusion (the belief that one is dead) result when a particular perceptual anomaly (caused by a disruption to the affective component of visual recognition) occurs in the context of an internalising attributional style. This hypothesis has not previously been tested directly. We report here an investigation of attributional style in a 24-year-old woman with Cotard delusion ("LU"). …