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ABSTRACT
Introduction: Although social cognition skills and biases are well-studied in paranoia, “mind perception” – perceiving the extent to which someone even possesses a thinking, feeling mind – is not. We sought to better characterise the profile of mind perception for individuals with paranoia.
Methods: We examined links between mind perception and paranoia in a large (n = 890) subclinical sample. Participants completed measures of paranoia, schizotypy, mind perception, and dispositional empathy. These assessments were examined for their relationships to one another, as well as the possibility that mind perception partially mediates the relationship between paranoia and empathy.
Results: Analyses revealed that increased paranoia was linked to less mind perception towards people. This distorted mind perception partially explained the link between paranoia and both perspective taking and empathic concern.
Conclusions: In paranoia – and psychopathology more broadly – understanding and addressing distorted mind perception may be one component of restoring social functioning.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 One potential alternative explanation for these results is that higher paranoia is linked to more random responding, pulling ratings towards the center of the scale and away from extremes, in which humans (high extreme) and objects (low extreme) reside. However, such random responding would not reveal a meaningful mediational pattern, which we investigate next.
2 Although the main effect of paranoia on empathic concern was not significant controlling for schizotypy, we still ran the analysis of indirect effects on the basis of theoretical predictions (see Shrout & Bolger, Citation2002).