Ideas of reference
What it means
Interpreting neutral, unrelated external events as having special personal significance or as being directed specifically at oneself. (The fixed, unshakeable form is a delusion of reference.)
Worked example
Believing the TV newsreader is sending him personal messages, or that strangers’ laughter must be about him.
In the exam
A man becomes convinced that the presenter on the television is talking directly to him and that overheard conversations in the street are really about him.
What settles it
Ideas of reference read neutral EVENTS as personally directed/significant. Hostile attribution bias specifically reads others’ BEHAVIOUR as hostile — referential thinking need not be threatening, only self-referential.
Classically confused with
Hostile attribution bias
Source: phenomenology of psychosis; ICD-11/DSM-5