Paranoia and self-consciousness.
A new instrument designed to assess paranoid thought in college students, together with reliability and validity data, was presented in Study 1. A single general factor accounted for a substantial portion of the variance in the full scale. Public self-consciousness was consistently and significantly correlated with the present measure of paranoia. In Study 2, both pretested paranoia and public self-consciousness were related to feelings of being watched (a classical manifestation of paranoia), although public self-consciousness had an effect only when there was a 2-way mirror present. In Study 3, self-attention, experimentally induced using a story construction task, again resulted in a heightened sense of being observed. Discussion focuses on paranoid cognition as characteristic of everyday thought and the implications of self-attention for social perception processes.
Fenigstein
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A
Department of Psychology, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio 43022-9623.
Vanable
P A
PA
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008950:MMPI / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008297:Male; D010260:Paranoid Personality Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D010865:Pilot Projects; D011594:Psychometrics; D012016:Reference Values; D012649:Self Concept