Living in suspicion and having irrational beliefs is more common than you think. Conspiracy ideas on the part of more or less specified individuals or organizations can find particular reinforcement in social media
Suspicious attitudes and real paranoid ideas
they are not exclusive to those who suffer dpsychotic disorders, but they can also occur with a certain frequency in the general population, especially in periods of social and economic tension. This is what emerges from research, carried out on approximately 1,300 people of Spanish nationality, published in the magazine Schizophrenia Researchand lead author Alba Contreras of the Psychological Sciences Research Institute in Leuven, Belgium.
Our research indicates that paranoid beliefs show a continuous distribution in the general population, within which a few individuals have many paranoid ideas and many individuals have few. These results are similar to those found in previous research on a representative sample of the British population.
The investigation
The results of the study highlighted how they are widespread concerns regarding people you deal with, so much so that the statement with which most people agreed was: it’s better to avoid letting other people know too much about you. for possible that this sense of uncertainty and vulnerability was influenced by the fact that the study was carried out during the pandemictherefore in conditions of social stress and uncertainty.
Even the magazine New Scientist dedicated an article to paranoia, defining it the unfounded belief that other people want to harm you, belief supported by thoughts such as the fear of receiving physical harm, or even just the idea that other people are laughing behind your back. These are prevalent and seriously disturbing ideas in some people who suffer from schizophrenia, but they can present themselves in anyone in the form of suspiciousness and irrational beliefs that become very difficult to dismantle.
The influence of loneliness and social media
Although it has been verified that frankly pathological paranoid ideation is often the consequence of a condition of lonelinessit has recently been established that some paranoid mental attitudes, such as conspiracy ideas by more or less specified individuals or organizations, may find particular reinforcement in social mediaas indicated by research carried out by Praveen Suthaharan and Philip Corlett of Yale University in New Haven in the USA.
Paranoid conspiracy theories can be maintained without particular stress if a person can believe that there are friends and acquaintances who share the same belief as they say in their study. As happens with political or religious beliefs, conspiracy ideas seem to be unassailable precisely because they are sharedand thus the anxiety and depression that normally occurs in those who believe in conspiracy theories are neutralized, they write.
The evolution of the concept of paranoia
The concept of paranoia has had some evolutions throughout the history of psychiatry, but essentially with this term today we refer to the presence of persecutory ideas, that is, the belief that someone more or less identified is intent on harming us. However, the concept of idea of reference also belongs to the same psychopathological area, i.e. the belief that completely normal or causal events can instead have some special meaning or even refer specifically to the person who perceives them.
The hypothesis: paranoia could play a role in human evolution
According to Nichola Raihani, a psychologist at University College London, it is possible that ideas of persecution and reference have been of some use in the evolutionary history of human beings. Primitive populations had to collaborate with foreign groups but remain wary of thembecause at any moment they could have revealed aggressive intentions.
In 2016 Raihani also carried out research on a group of volunteers to explore the relationships between paranoid thinking and ethnic discrimination, discovering that suspiciousness increases when groups perceived as strangers are present in the context. One must imagine the general tendency to experience paranoid thoughts a bit like it was the volume knob on the radio He says. If humans have this ability for a reason, then they must be able to turn it up or down as needed. And so exposure to what is perceived as a possible social threat becomes the stimulus that makes many people turn up the volume.
At the basis of the disorder is perhaps the hyperactivity of brain areas
was recently identified a specific alteration in the functional connectivity between certain brain areas which appears typical of people with a tendency towards persecutory and paranoid thinking. This is an anomalous information exchange activity between the prefrontal cerebral cortex and the amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure that represents a fundamental hub in the processes of managing fear.
In particular, it would be above all the connectivity with the right amygdala that is hyperactive in those who tend to paranoid thinking. The prefrontal cerebral cortex plays a very important role in the integration of signals coming from other structures of the brain and the place responsible for the top-down control of human behavior says Linlin Fan of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, first author of a study published in Journal of Psychiatric Research.
October 29, 2023 (modified October 29, 2023 | 08:16)
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