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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychopathology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1474562
This article is part of the Research Topic The Way We See Ourselves and Others as a Central Issue in Mental Health: The Current Evidence on Self-esteem and Self-Schemas View all 4 articles

Manipulating self and other schemas to explore psychological processes associated with paranoid beliefs: an online experimental study

Provisionally accepted
Anton P. Martinez Anton P. Martinez *Elizabeth Milne Elizabeth Milne Georgina Rowse Georgina Rowse Richard P Bentall Richard P Bentall
  • Department of Psychology, Faculty of Science, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Background: Information about the self and others is organized in cognitive-affective structures that influence and guide interpersonal behaviour. These structures are referred to as relational schemas and are thought to be influenced by early interpersonal experiences with significant others leading to secure or insecure attachment patterns as adults. When insecure, these patterns appear to contribute to paranoid interpretations about the intentions of others by indirect pathways such as negative self-esteem and a bias towards untrustworthiness.Experimental studies employing classical conditioning (CC) interventions have been successful in manipulating these schemas, finding significant effects on various psychological outcomes such as attachment styles, implicit self-esteem, and paranoid beliefs. However, no study to date has explored these effects on trustworthiness judgements. Objective: This study aims to replicate the findings from previous experiments and also testing the effect of manipulating relational schemas on trustworthiness evaluations. Methods: A convenience online sample of 266 participants completed a series of tasks and questionnaires measuring attachment styles, explicit and implicit self-esteem, paranoia, and trustworthiness evaluations before and after a brief CC intervention, which involved being randomly allocated to three conditions. In each of these conditions, information about the self was always paired with either positive face stimuli (proximity-seeking condition), negative face stimuli (self-threat condition), or neutral face stimuli (control condition). Results: This study failed to replicate findings as previously reported in published experiments (i.e., self-esteem, paranoia), only finding a significant effect on attachment styles on the proximity-seeking CC condition. Moreover, no effect was found regarding trustworthiness judgements. Discussion: Limitations such as the online nature of the study and methodological aspects are discussed.

    Keywords: Relational schemas, trustworthiness, Attachment styles, paranoia, Classical Conditioning

    Received: 01 Aug 2024; Accepted: 18 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Martinez, Milne, Rowse and Bentall. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Anton P. Martinez, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Science, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.