Recent evidence suggests that sleep problems are associated with psychotic like experiences including paranoia. However, the mechanisms underpinning this association are not well understood and thus studies modelling hypothesised mediating factors are required. Alexithymia, the inability to recognise and describe emotions within the self may be an important candidate. In two separate studies we...

Studies revealed that patients with paranoid schizophrenia display overconfidence in errors for memory and social cognition tasks. The present investigation examined whether this pattern holds true for visual perception tasks. Nonclinical participants were recruited via an online panel. Individuals were asked to complete a questionnaire that included the Paranoia Checklist and were then present...

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 ...

INTRODUCTION This study reports on the development of a new measure of hostile social-cognitive biases for use in paranoia research, the Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ). The AIHQ is comprised of a variety of negative situations that differ in terms of intentionality. Items were developed to reflect causes that were ambiguous, intentional, and accidental in nature. METHODS ...

In this article, a data-driven approach was adopted to demonstrate how real-life diary techniques [ie, the experience sampling method (ESM)] could be deployed for assessment purposes in patients with psychotic disorder, delivering individualized and clinically relevant information. The dataset included patients in an acute phase of psychosis and the focus was on paranoia as one of the main psyc...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Cognitive models of paranoia incorporate many of the processes implicated in the maintenance of anxiety disorders. Despite this, the role of mental imagery in paranoia remains under-researched. The current study examined the impact of a self-imagery manipulation in people with high non-clinical paranoia. METHODS We used a mixed design with one between-subjects variable...

Both psychology and psychiatry are dominated by individualistic accounts of paranoia (and indeed, other forms of distress). As a corrective to these, this paper provides a social account of paranoia grounded in a minimal notion of embodied subjectivity constituted from the interpenetration of feelings, perception and discourse. Paranoia is conceptualised as a mode or tendency within embodied su...

Both psychology and psychiatry are dominated by individualistic accounts of paranoia (and indeed, other forms of distress). As a corrective to these, this paper provides a social account of paranoia grounded in a minimal notion of embodied subjectivity constituted from the interpenetration of feelings, perception and discourse. Paranoia is conceptualised as a mode or tendency within embodied su...

The present study examines the relationships between paranoia, conspiracist ideation, and boredom proneness. A sample of the general public (N = 150) completed the Paranoia scale, the Boredom Proneness scale, and the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs scale. Bivariate correlations revealed significant interrelationships between the three traits. Further analysis revealed that the relationship between...

INTRODUCTION Ideas of reference (IOR), paranoia and social anxiety are features of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, which appear to be conceptually related; however, the precise nature of these relationships is unclear. These relationships may be partially explained by perceived intentionality (PI), a social-cognitive bias for perceiving other people's actions during unpleasant situations as b...