BACKGROUND Paranoia may build directly upon negative thoughts about the self. There have been few direct experimental tests of this hypothesis. AIMS The aim of the study was to test the immediate effects of manipulating self-esteem in individuals vulnerable to paranoia. METHOD A two condition cross-over experimental test was conducted. The participants were 26 males reporting paranoid ideat...

BACKGROUND There is widespread interest in whether psychosis exists on a continuum with healthy functioning. Previous research has implied that paranoia, a common symptom of psychosis, exists on a continuum but this has not been investigated using samples including both patients and non-patients and up-to-date taxometric methods. AIM To assess the latent structure of paranoia in a diverse sam...

A key problem in studying a hypothesized spectrum of severity of delusional ideation is determining that ideas are unfounded. The first objective was to use virtual reality to validate groups of individuals with low, moderate, and high levels of unfounded persecutory ideation. The second objective was to investigate, drawing upon a cognitive model of persecutory delusions, whether clinical and ...

This review traces, through psychiatric textbooks, the history of the Kraepelinian concept of paranoia in the 20th century and then relates the common reported symptoms and signs to the diagnostic criteria for paranoia/delusional disorder in DSM-III through DSM-5. Clinical descriptions of paranoia appearing in 10 textbooks, published 1899 to 1970, revealed 11 prominent symptoms and signs report...

The present study tested a continuum model of paranoid symptom expression in a sample of African-American men receiving inpatient treatment in a state psychiatric hospital. The continuum measure comprised the scales of Distrust (DST), Perceived Hostility of Others (PHO), and False Beliefs and Perceptions (FBP) from the Psychiatric Epidemiology Research Interview (PERI), reflecting mild to sever...

The heightened belief that others intend to harm you (paranoia) is often accompanied by social withdrawal, avoidance and isolation. We investigated whether paranoia related betrayal aversion: the tendency avoid potential caused other people over above an equivalent a non-social mechanism. Across three large-N (Ntotal = 2433) pre-registered online studies, we employed game theoretic paradigm whe...

Information in the environment is frequently ambiguous in meaning. Emotional ambiguity, such as the stare of a stranger, or the scream of a child, encompasses possible good or bad emotional consequences. Those with elevated vulnerability to affective disorders tend to interpret such material more negatively than those without, a phenomenon known as "negative interpretation bias." In this study ...