When is it confabulation?
In this week’s peer review activity I asked you to briefly describe a confabulation, and if you wished, share your assignments. A confabulation is a false account of things. The reason the term confabulation exists is so we are able to differentiate it from lies, tall stories, fabrications, deliberate deceit, and so on.
A pathology example from my work should provide additional insights into how confabulation has been understood in psychology. Importantly, here a confabulation is not under the deliberate and conscious control of the agent of the mind. These are false memories, false accounts, distorted versions of events that occur to the mind and are perceived by the agent of the mind as being what has actually happened or what is actually happening. Confabulations have a particular purpose – responses to feelings that may be uncomfortable or undesirable. For further reading on confabulations and related literature, please see this reference list which I have put together.
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