• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: How Do People with Persecutory Delusions Evaluate Threat in a Controlled Social Environment? A Qualitative Study Using Virtual Reality
  • Contributor: Fornells-Ambrojo, Miriam; Freeman, Daniel; Slater, Mel; Swapp, David; Antley, Angus; Barker, Chris
  • Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2015
  • Published in: Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 43 (2015) 1, Seite 89-107
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1017/s1352465813000830
  • ISSN: 1352-4658; 1469-1833
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: Background:Environmental factors have been associated with psychosis but there is little qualitative research looking at how the ongoing interaction between individual and environment maintains psychotic symptoms.Aims:The current study investigates how people with persecutory delusions interpret events in a virtual neutral social environment using qualitative methodology.Method:20 participants with persecutory delusions and 20 controls entered a virtual underground train containing neutral characters. Under these circumstances, people with persecutory delusions reported similar levels of paranoia as non-clinical participants. The transcripts of a post-virtual reality interview of the first 10 participants in each group were analysed.Results:Thematic analyses of interviews focusing on the decision making process associated with attributing intentions of computer-generated characters revealed 11 themes grouped in 3 main categories (evidence in favour of paranoid appraisals, evidence against paranoid appraisals, other behaviour).Conclusions:People with current persecutory delusions are able to use a range of similar strategies to healthy volunteers when making judgements about potential threat in a neutral environment that does not elicit anxiety, but they are less likely than controls to engage in active hypothesis-testing and instead favour experiencing “affect” as evidence of persecutory intention.