self-consciousness' characterized by the feelings that one is under intensive evaluation or scrutiny. Becoming self-tormenting will increase the odds of interpreting others' behaviors in a self-referential way. Hypervigilance and rumination Self-consciousness was characterized as an aversive psychological state. According to this model, people experiencing self-consciousness will be highly motivated to reduce it, trying to make sense of what they are experiencing. These attempts promote hypervigilance and rumination in a circular relationship: more hypervigilance generates more rumination, whereupon more rumination generates more hypervigilance. Hypervigilance can be thought of as a way to appraise threatening social information, but in contrast to adaptive vigilance, hypervigilance will produce elevated levels of arousal, fear, anxiety, and threat perception. Rumination is another possible response to threatening social information. Rumination can be related to the paranoid social cognition because it can increase negative thinking about negative events, and evoke a pessimistic explanatory style. Judgmental and cognitive biases Three main judgmental consequences have been identified: The sinister attribution error: This bias captures the tendency that social perceivers have to overattribute lack of trustworthiness to others. The overly personalistic construal of social interaction: Refers to the inclination that paranoid perceiver has to interpret others’ action in a disproportional self-referential way, increasing the belief that they are the target of others’ thoughts and actions. A special kind of bias in the biased punctuation of social interaction, which entail an overperception of causal linking among independent events. The exaggerated perception of conspiracy: Refers to the disposition that the paranoid perceiver has to overattribute social coherence and coordination to others’ actions. Meta-analyses have confirmed that individuals with paranoia tend to jump to conclusions and are incorrigible in their judgements, even for delusion-neutral scenarios. Research A study suggests that combining cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with SlowMo, an app that helps notice their "unhelpful fast-thinking" might be more effective for treating paranoia in people with psychosis than CBT alone. See also Anxiety Apophenia Borderline personality disorder Case of Aimée Conspiracy theory Delusions of reference Distrust Fusion paranoia Ideas of reference Monomania Narcissistic personality disorder Paranoid fiction Paranoid personality disorder Posttraumatic stress disorder Pronoia Querulant Schizophrenia Schizotypal personality disorder Whispers: The Voices of Paranoia References Sources American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR: Fourth edition Text Revision) (2000) Further reading American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental health disorders (4th ed). Washington DC: Author. Canneti, Elias (1962). Crowds