Researchers use virtual reality to study social paranoia

[sapience]

Check out this fascinating article describing how researchers are using virtual reality to study how different people interpret identical social situations.Paranoid thoughts are often triggered by ambiguous events such as people looking in one's direction or hearing laughter in a room but it is very difficult to recreate such social interactions,"

Comments

[ijournaler]

The London Underground is a good place to investigate paranoia. I happened to be passing through London on Thursday when there was an incident which closed the Victoria Line. It was a broken down train as it happened but as there was a terrorist attack on the underground 3 years ago there's always fear of a repeat. It wasn't really clear what was happening, there were huge crowds surging down fairly narrow corridors to other underground lines and I felt really unsafe.

[sapience]

I love you. *smooch*

[spoonless]

How do you think you react to ambiguous social cues?

Emotionally, I almost always react in a paranoid way. Intellectually, I've learned a long time ago that most of my perceptions about social cues are wrong. So I'm somewhat used to ignoring them and continuing on. But then it gets confusing, because sometimes paranoia really is justified and I can't tell the difference. So I usually just react in an ambiguous way, to be safe in case someone was really offended by my behavior or really dislikes me.

[fartraveller]

I assume they are all about me and I generally take them far more positivly than they are intended. That's how I thought for years that girls were far more "in to me" than in fact they were.