Psychologist Daniel Freeman (Institute of Psychiatry) and his collaborators have used virtual reality (VR) to provide the clearest demonstration yet that paranoid thoughts are more prevalent among the general population than previously realised.
A difficulty when investigating degrees of paranoia among research participants has been ensuring that everyone experiences an identical situation, especially considering how people’s own behaviour influences how others act towards them. The use of VR allowed Freeman’s team to compare participants’ responses to an identical situation.
Two hundred ‘healthy’ participants without a clinical diagnosis donned a headset that placed them inside a ‘virtual’ crowded tube train. The majority of participants responded in a neutral or positive way to the animated tube passengers, but around a third responded negatively, believing, for example, that another passenger wanted to intimidate them. ‘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,’ Freeman said.
However, The Psychologist put it to Dr Freeman that participants enrolled in a psychology study might well be biased towards expecting something out of the ordinary to happen, thus inducing hypervigilance. He told us: ‘The key point to remember is that, although everybody had the same experience, there were striking differences in interpretation, from very positive to very negative. This indicates that the interpretations were more to do with what a person brought to the situation than the VR situation itself. For example, participants who were worriers, and those with lower self-esteem were more likely to make paranoid judgements.’
The new findings, which are published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (tinyurl.com/5vwmoe), come after a University of Manchester study, published
last year that discovered from interviews that ‘healthy’ participants and patients with psychosis experience similar kinds of paranoid thoughts (tinyurl.com/4lwwf). However, differences did emerge: the patients’ paranoia tended to be more outlandish and to be characterised by a lack of
control.
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