This distinctive attribute may have influence not only in how people are perceived, but may also affect the way they perceive themselves. Perceived evaluative scrutiny: According to this model, dysphoric self-consciousness may increase when people feel under moderate or intensive evaluative social scrutiny such as when an asymmetric relationship is analyzed. For example, when asked about their relationships, doctoral students remembered events that they interpreted as significant to their degree of trust in their advisors when compared with their advisors. This suggests that students are more willing to pay more attention to their advisor than their advisor is motivated to pay attention to them. Also students spent more time ruminating about the behaviors, events, and their relationship in general. Uncertainty about social standing: The knowledge about the social standing is another factor that may induce paranoid social cognition. Many researchers have argued that experiencing uncertainty about a social position in a social system constitutes an adverse psychological state, one which people are highly motivated to reduce. Dysphoric self-consciousness
Refers to an aversive form of heightened public self-consciousness characterized by the feelings that one is under intensive evaluation or scrutiny. Becoming self-tormenting will increase the odds of interpreting others behaviors in a self-referential way. Hypervigilance and rumination
Self-consciousness was characterized as an aversive psychological state. According to this model, people experiencing self-consciousness will be highly motivated to reduce it, trying to make sense of what they are experiencing. These attempts promote hypervigilance and rumination in a circular relationship: more hypervigilance generates more rumination, whereupon more rumination generates more hypervigilance.
For further information, see stimulant psychosis and substance-induced psychosis. Based on data obtained by the Dutch NEMESIS project in 2005, there was an association between impaired hearing and the onset of symptoms of psychosis, which was based on a five-year follow up. Some older studies have actually declared that a state of paranoia can be produced in patients that were under a hypnotic state of deafness. This idea however generated much skepticism during its time. Diagnosis
In the DSM-IV-TR, paranoia is diagnosed in the form of:
Paranoid personality disorder (F60.0)
Paranoid schizophrenia (a subtype of schizophrenia) (F20.0)
The persecutory type of delusional disorder, which is also called "querulous paranoia" when the focus is to remedy some injustice by legal action (F22.8)According to clinical psychologist P. J. McKenna, "As a noun, paranoia denotes a disorder which has been argued in and out of existence, and whose clinical features, course, boundaries, and virtually every other aspect of which is controversial. Employed as an adjective, paranoid has become attached to a diverse set of presentations, from paranoid schizophrenia, through paranoid depression, to paranoid personality—not to mention a motley collection of paranoid psychoses, reactions, and states—and this is to restrict discussion to functional disorders. Even when abbreviated down to the prefix para-, the term crops up causing trouble as the contentious but stubbornly persistent concept of paraphrenia".At least 50% of the diagnosed cases of schizophrenia experience delusions of reference and delusions of persecution.