Article of the Month: July and August

The “Article of the Month” initiative, promoted by the Research and Communication Committee of the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, has selected the paper “Disentangling Paranoia and Social Anxiety: Overlap and Differentiation in Daily Life”, published in the journal Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment.Paranoia refers to unfounded distrust or suspicion of other people’s intentions, which are interpreted as threatening.

Social anxiety, in turn, refers to the intense worry and fear associated with social interactions. Both experiences share certain characteristics: they can cause considerable distress in interpersonal relationships and manifest at different levels of intensity, ranging from common or subclinical experiences to more severe clinical forms.

It is important to note that relatively little research has examined how paranoia and social anxiety relate to people’s emotions, thoughts, and social interactions. The study therefore aimed to determine the extent to which they present shared or distinct manifestations in everyday life.

To achieve this, the researchers used Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), which collects information in real time and in participants’ usual environments through questionnaires delivered to their mobile phones. For one week, participants completed a brief questionnaire eight times a day about their emotional state, appraisals of themselves and others, suspicious thoughts, current activities, and social experiences.

The results showed that paranoia and social anxiety share several manifestations of emotional distress in everyday life. Higher scores on both variables were associated with greater negative affect, uncertainty, anxiety, sadness, and irritability, as well as more negative appraisals of oneself and others. They were also associated with a greater tendency to feel criticized or belittled and to experience distrustful thoughts and perceptions in everyday situations.

Despite these similarities, the study identified important differences. After accounting for the variance shared by the two phenomena, paranoia was specifically associated with greater anger, lower levels of happiness, more intense emotions, and a greater tendency to perceive situations as stressful. It was also linked to perceiving the surrounding environment as more threatening, reflected in experiences such as feeling watched, mistreated, or threatened, distrusting other people’s intentions, or feeling unsafe.Social anxiety, by contrast, was more specifically associated with sensitivity to rejection and negative self-appraisals in social relationships. People with higher levels of social anxiety tended to feel that others did not care about them and preferred to be alone when they were with other people. When alone, they were also more likely to interpret their situation as a consequence of rejection by others. In addition, the less close they felt to the people they were with, the stronger their desire to be alone.

These findings suggest that paranoia and social anxiety should not be understood as entirely independent phenomena, but rather as  experiences related to each other with some distinct manifestations in everyday life. Recognizing this distinction may help guide future interventions: negative affect could serve as a shared therapeutic target, whereas threat interpretations may require particular attention in paranoia. In social anxiety, it may be especially important to address sensitivity to rejection and difficulties experiencing social interactions as rewarding.

In the elaboration of the article, professor Neus Vidal Barrantes, a full professor in the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, participated in the study and contributed to its conceptualization, methodology, and supervision. The research was conducted jointly with Yunlai Gui, Alysia M. Berglund, and Laura M. Hernández, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Leslie E. Horton, from the University of Pittsburgh; Molly A. Walsh and Paul J. Silvia, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and Thomas R. Kwapil, who is affiliated with both the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.