By Bonnie Malkin and agencies - Telegraph.co.uk
11:33am BST 01/04/2008
The British population are highly paranoid, a study into fear on London's underground system has found.
Experts used to believe that paranoid thoughts - often involving exaggerated feelings of persecution or threat - were usually confined to people with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia.
The computer-generated characters breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants
But the new research, involving a "virtual" journey on the London underground, suggests that around a third of people regularly have moments of paranoia.
Dr Daniel Freeman, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, who developed and led the experiment, said: "Paranoid thoughts are often triggered by ambiguous events such as people looking in one's direction or hearing laughter in a room, but it is very difficult to recreate such social interactions.
"Virtual reality allows us to do just that, to look at how different people interpret exactly the same social situation. It is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people."
In the study, 200 volunteers drawn from the general population wore virtual reality headsets which set them on a computer-generated tube journey.
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During the four minute ride between London underground stops, the volunteers were able to walk around a carriage filled with "virtual" passengers who behaved like real people.
The computer-generated characters breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants. One read a newspaper, while another occasionally smiled if looked at. To add to the realism, a soundtrack of a train carriage was played.
While most volunteers found the computer characters friendly or neutral, almost 40 per cent experienced at least one paranoid thought.
A pre-assessment showed that those who were anxious, worried, pessimistic, or had low self-esteem, were most likely to feel paranoid.
One participant who experienced paranoid thoughts told the scientists: "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."
Another said: "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."
The findings are reported today in the British Journal of Psychiatry (1).
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