ABSTRACT
Paraprosopia involves the experience that people's faces metamorphose into distorted and threatening faces. According to Grusser and Landis patients presenting with paraprosopia report that a face considered to be normal or friendly transforms within a few seconds into a threatening face that can be seen as a were-wolf, vampire or devil, with large fangs, huge threatening eyes, and bushy eyebrows. Paraprosopia is an infrequently reported psychiatric symptom. It might be considered related to the perceptual distortions of faces noted in some cases of brain injury, which are usually called metamorphopsias by neurologists. Metamorphopsic patients describe faces as looking ugly like fish heads. In paraprosopia, however, the transformation is to a face that is threatening, rather than distorted per se. For this reason, paraprosopia is usually considered to be closely related to delusional misidentification (DM). Paraprosopia can be considered to be closely related to intermetamorphosis, but the face changes to a generally threatening form rather than that of a specific individual.
