Recent theoretical models suggest that perceived racism acts as a stressor for African Americans and may be associated with a variety of negative psychological consequences, notably paranoia. Paranoia among African Americans is believed to reflect the lower end of the paranoia continuum based on experiences with racism. Thus, it may be beneficial to measure paranoia on a continuum, but few stud...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of subclinical paranoia on social perception and behavior. Two groups of participants, those high and low in subclinical paranoia, were identified based on extreme scores on the Paranoia Scale (PS). As expected, persons high in subclinical paranoia had greater depression, social anxiety, self-consciousness, and lower self-esteem compared ...

BACKGROUND This study reports the development and revision of the Beliefs about Paranoia Scale (BaPS), a self-report measure to assess metacognitive beliefs about paranoia in non-patients. We aimed to confirm the factor structure of a revised 50-item version of the measure and test the specific hypotheses that positive beliefs about paranoia would predict frequency of paranoia, and that negativ...

Emotion regulation (ER) has become a relevant construct to understanding paranoia. While the ER strategy called expressive suppression (e.g., poker face) may foster state paranoia by increasing arousal, another strategy called reappraisal (e.g., changing the perspective on situations) may reduce negative emotions and state paranoia when adaptively used. However, if reappraisal fails, this could...

Research increasingly assesses momentary changes in paranoia in order to elucidate causal mechanisms. Observed or manipulated changes in postulated causal factors should result in fluctuations in state paranoid ideation. Previous studies often employed a state-adapted Paranoia Checklist (Freeman et al., 2005) to measure state paranoia. This study examined whether the Paranoia Checklist or subse...

A novel experimental paradigm for measuring state paranoia by means of signal detection theory was evaluated. A liberal response bias, indicating the tendency to recognize facial expressions as threatening, was expected to reflect paranoia. Against theoretical expectations, heightened paranoia questionnaire scores were associated with a non-liberal bias, which was not affected by negative emoti...

A growing body of research shows that paranoia is common in the general population. We report three studies that examined the Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG) as a paradigm for evaluation of non-clinical paranoia. The PDG captures three key qualities that are at the heart of paranoia--it is interpersonal, it concerns threat, and it concerns the perception of others' intentions towards the self. St...

Mistrust of others may build upon perceptions of the self as vulnerable, consistent with an association of paranoia with perceived lower social rank. Height is a marker of social status and authority. Therefore we tested the effect of manipulating height, as a proxy for social rank, on paranoia. Height was manipulated within an immersive virtual reality simulation. Sixty females who reported pa...

Paranoia is receiving increasing attention in its own right, since it is a central experience of psychotic disorders and a marker of the health of a society. Paranoia is associated with use of the most commonly taken illicit drug, cannabis. The objective was to determine whether the principal psychoactive ingredient of cannabis-∆(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-causes paranoia and to use the drug...

Paranoia is common and distressing in the general population and can impact on health, emotional well-being and social functioning, such that effective interventions are needed. Brief online mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression in non-clinical samples; however, at present, there is no research investigating whether they can reduce p...