People More Paranoid Than Suspected, Say Psychiatrists

Ask people whether they're paranoid, and most say they're not.

But take a peek inside their heads, says King's College London psychiatrist Daniel Freeman, and things get weird.

Freeman and his colleagues put 200 virtual reality helmet-clad people in a subway ride simulation populated by ostensibly neutral avatars who read newspapers, looked around and sometimes caught their gaze.

Afterwards, Freeman asked subjects what they thought of the avatars.
Almost 40 percent experienced one paranoid thought, he reported yesterday in the *British Journal of Psychiatry. *

What counts as paranoid? Here are a few responses from the press release:

"There was a guy spooking me out -- tried to get away from him. Didn't like his face. I'm sure he looked at me more than a couple of times though might be imagining it."

"A girl kept moving her hand. Looked like she was a pickpocket and would pass it to the person standing opposite her."

"Felt trapped between two men in the doorway. As a woman I'm a lot more suspicious of men. Didn't like the close proximity of the men. The guy opposite may have had sexual intent, manipulation or whatever."

"There's something dodgy about one guy. Like he was about to do something -- assault someone, plant a bomb, say something not nice to me, be aggressive."

That seems pretty paranoid indeed.

Unsurprisingly, the more likely a person was to be weirded out by smiling strangers and coincidental glances, the lower their self-esteem tended to be. They were also more likely to fear terrorism on the
London subway system, and in reality tended to avoid the subway.

"In the past, only those with a severe mental illness were thought to experience paranoid thoughts, but now we know that this is simply not the case," said Freeman. "About one-third of the general population regularly experience persecutory thoughts."

I'm not sure the study deserves *quite *that level of extrapolation just yet. The correlations between habits of mind and social responses make sense, but as for sheer numbers -- well, a jaggedly bitmapped subway ride run by strange psychiatrists might make subjects a bit edgier than usual.

But the findings' ultimate importance may be methodological rather than immediate. When studying such interior phenomena as paranoia, psychiatrists usually rely on questionnaires about real-world experiences. They still used questionnaires in this study -- but at least they were able to define the environment and the interactions, allowing research to take place in a controlled but semi-real setting.

Now if only they could improve the resolution.

A virtual reality study of paranoid thinking in the general population [British Journal of Psychiatry]

Image: British Journal of Psychiatry

See Also:

• Chem Lab: Scientists Are Learning How Weed Causes Paranoia
• NASA Seeks Input from Massive Multiplayer Online Development ...
• Better Balance Through Virtual Reality

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