Latest Expert Witness News

Feeling Paranoid? You’re Not Alone

Paranoia is far more common in the general population than previously thought, a new study shows.

Paranoia loves company.

Feeling paranoid means harboring unreasonable suspicions of people and/or situations. A person who is paranoid might hear people laughing in the next room and assume the group is laughing at him or view a casual glance from a stranger as a threat.

Now an unusual study, highlighted on the mental health Web site PsychCentral, has used virtual reality to study people’s reactions to everyday situations. In the study, 200 volunteers who were representative of the general population wore virtual reality headsets that let them ride a London subway for four minutes. They walked around the virtual train car, where they encountered computerized images of other riders. The virtual images, called avatars, read the paper or occasionally looked around, sometimes smiling at or meeting the gaze of the volunteer.

Most of the volunteers thought the virtual passengers were friendly or neutral, but a surprising 40 percent experienced at least one paranoid thought about the virtual subway ride. People who were anxious, worried or who had low self-esteem were the most likely to have paranoid thoughts, according to the study, published in The British Journal of Psychiatry.

PsychCentral lists some of the comments the study subjects made about the virtual reality characters.

 “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.”

“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.”

The findings are important because paranoia is generally thought to be a symptom of severe mental illness. But this virtual reality study shows that paranoid thoughts are common in the general population.

“Paranoid thinking is a topic of national discussion given increasing public attention to threats such as terrorism,” said Dr. Daniel Freeman, the developer of the virtual reality program and a Wellcome Trust researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London. “Worries about other people are so common that they seem to be an essential — if unwelcome — part of what it means to be human,” he told PsychCentral.

back