Neural correlates of paranoia : an ERP study of clinically anxious and healthy participants

Background: Paranoia is a common trans-diagnostic psychological symptom involving thoughts and feelings of irrational mistrust, suspicion, persecution, threat or conspiracy. Paranoia occurs most commonly in psychotic disorders but also commonly occurs in other mental disorders and on a continuum in the general population. It is often associated with anxiety, hostility, hypervigilance and defensiveness. The psychophysiological processes involved in paranoia are not fully understood. Paranoia has been variously hypothesised to reflect disturbances in early perceptual processing, impaired emotional processing or regulation, impulsivity in terms of jumping to conclusions, or impairment in reasoning ability to assign meanings. Previous studies of paranoia have largely relied on self-report methodology. The high temporal resolution of event-related potentials (ERPS) allows the study of brain electrical activity during information-processing associatedwith early perceptual processing versus relatively more complex stages of inhibition and cognition. ERPs may thus be able to locate informationprocessing stages associated with anomalous brain activity in paranoia, to differentiate between explanations and improve understanding of this common symptom.