The role of subclinical paranoia on social perception and behavior.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of subclinical paranoia on social perception and behavior. Two groups of participants, those high and low in subclinical paranoia, were identified based on extreme scores on the Paranoia Scale (PS). As expected, persons high in subclinical paranoia had greater depression, social anxiety, self-consciousness, and lower self-esteem compared to persons low in subclinical paranoia. In addition, persons high in subclinical paranoia performed worse than persons low in subclinical paranoia on laboratory measures of emotion perception and on an in vivo social perception task. Finally, behavioral differences between these two groups were revealed: Persons high in subclinical paranoia sat further away from the examiner and took longer to read the consent form than low-paranoia persons. These behavioral differences were not due to the group differences in clinical functioning, indicating that level of paranoia generally accounted for these findings. Copyright 2003 Elsevier B.V.