The present study examines the relationships between paranoia, conspiracist ideation, and boredom proneness. A sample of the general public (N = 150) completed the Paranoia scale, the Boredom Proneness scale, and the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs scale. Bivariate correlations revealed significant interrelationships between the three traits. Further analysis revealed that the relationship between...

INTRODUCTION Ideas of reference (IOR), paranoia and social anxiety are features of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, which appear to be conceptually related; however, the precise nature of these relationships is unclear. These relationships may be partially explained by perceived intentionality (PI), a social-cognitive bias for perceiving other people's actions during unpleasant situations as b...

In this essay, the use of postmodern rhetorical irony as a subversive strategy is explored. In particular, Susan Dorothea White's painting, The First Supper, is analyzed as a subversive, postmodern ironic reading of Leonardo da Vinci's famed work, The Last Supper. This analysis suggests that subversive irony assumes distinctive and complex technical and theoretical characteristics, most relevan...

BACKGROUND Paranoia may build directly upon negative thoughts about the self. There have been few direct experimental tests of this hypothesis. AIMS The aim of the study was to test the immediate effects of manipulating self-esteem in individuals vulnerable to paranoia. METHOD A two condition cross-over experimental test was conducted. The participants were 26 males reporting paranoid ideat...

In examining the postmodern turn in counseling and its implications for school counseling practice, it is suggested that in postmodern approaches, there is a change in the use of the narrative metaphor, a shift from the therapeutic focus on problems to solutions, and a reinterpretation of the meanings of the core counseling values that sustain the client-counselor therapeutic relationship. An i...

Although childbirth is fundamentally involved with the issue of women's bodies, it is also involved with such social values as politics, economics, medicine, and other phenomena characteristic of a particular time and culture. In this article I divide Japanese society and childbirth into pre-modern, modern, and postmodern phases, with special emphasis on the postmodern phase. I use the word "po...

BACKGROUND There is widespread interest in whether psychosis exists on a continuum with healthy functioning. Previous research has implied that paranoia, a common symptom of psychosis, exists on a continuum but this has not been investigated using samples including both patients and non-patients and up-to-date taxometric methods. AIM To assess the latent structure of paranoia in a diverse sam...

A key problem in studying a hypothesized spectrum of severity of delusional ideation is determining that ideas are unfounded. The first objective was to use virtual reality to validate groups of individuals with low, moderate, and high levels of unfounded persecutory ideation. The second objective was to investigate, drawing upon a cognitive model of persecutory delusions, whether clinical and ...