I am not making this up. Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London have used virtual reality to measure the degree of paranoia in individuals. I think using VR for research is all well and fine, but how valid is a study like this? If volunteers are being strapped into virtual reality headsets, then one has to wonder if there might perhaps be some level of apprehension at the beginning of the study, and thus skewing the results. Nonetheless, the results are what they are, and now we are left to try to interpret them:

Wearing virtual reality headsets, 200 volunteers broadly representative of the general population walked around a virtual London underground carriage in a four-minute journey between station stops. The carriage contained neutral computer people (avatars) that breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants. One avatar read a newspaper, another would occasionally smile if looked at. A soundtrack of a train carriage was played.

Dr Freeman and colleagues found that the participants interpreted the same computer characters very differently. The most common reaction was to find the virtual reality characters friendly or neutral, but almost 40% of the participants experienced at least one paranoid thought. The participants were extensively assessed before entering the train ride, and it was found that those who were anxious, worried, focused on the worst-case scenarios and had low self-esteem were the most likely to have paranoid thoughts. The results of the study are published today in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Comments about the virtual reality characters by participants who experienced paranoid thoughts included:

"There was a guy spooking me out -- tried to get away from him. Didn't like his face. I'm sure he looked at me more than a couple of times though might be imagining it."

"A girl kept moving her hand. Looked like she was a pickpocket and would pass it to the person standing opposite her."

"Felt trapped between two men in the doorway. As a woman I'm a lot more suspicious of men. Didn't like the close proximity of the men. The guy opposite may have had sexual intent, manipulation or whatever."

"There's something dodgy about one guy. Like he was about to do something -- assault someone, plant a bomb, say something not nice to me, be aggressive."

"In the past, only those with a severe mental illness were thought to experience paranoid thoughts, but now we know that this is simply not the case," says Dr Freeman. "About one-third of the general population regularly experience persecutory thoughts. This shouldn't be surprising. At the heart of all social interactions is a vital judgment whether to trust or mistrust, but it is a judgment that is error-prone. We are more likely to make paranoid errors if we are anxious, ruminate and have had bad experiences from others in the past."

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