Paranoia as a deficit in non-social belief updating

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Abstract

Paranoia is the belief that harm is intended by others. It may arise from selective pressures to infer and avoid social threats, particularly in ambiguous or changing circumstances. We propose that uncertainty may be sufficient to elicit learning differences in paranoid individuals, without social threat. We used reversal learning behavior and computational modeling to estimate belief updating across individuals with and without mental illness, online participants, and rats chronically exposed to methamphetamine, an elicitor of paranoia in humans. Paranoia is associated with a stronger prior on volatility, accompanied by elevated sensitivity to perceived changes in the task environment. Methamphetamine exposure in rats recapitulates this impaired uncertainty-driven belief updating and rigid anticipation of a volatile environment. Our work provides evidence of fundamental, domain-general learning differences in paranoid individuals. This paradigm enables further assessment of the interplay between uncertainty and belief-updating across individuals and species.

Data availability

Data are available on ModelDB83 (http://modeldb.yale.edu/258631) with accession code p2c8q74m. Figures 2-10 have associated raw data available. Code for the HGF toolbox v5.3.1 is freely available at https://translationalneuromodeling.github.io/tapas/.

Article and author information

Author details

Erin J Reed

Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Stefan Uddenberg

Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, New Jersey, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Praveen Suthaharan

Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Christoph H Mathys

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Trieste, Italy

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Jane R Taylor

Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Stephanie Mary Groman

Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5231-0612
Philip R Corlett

Psychiatry, Yale University, New Haven, United States

For correspondence
philip.corlett@yale.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5368-1992

Funding

NIMH (R01MH12887)

Philip R Corlett

NIMH (R21MH120799-01)

Stephanie Mary Groman
Philip R Corlett

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) at Yale University

Human subjects: Experiments were conducted at Yale University and the Connecticut Mental Health Center (New Haven, CT) in strict accordance with Yale University's Human Investigation Committee and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Informed consent was provided by all research participants (Yale HIC# 2000022111: Beliefs and Personality Traits)

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.