Umgang mit negativen Emotionen und im Zusammenhang mit paranoiden Überzeugungen. Eine experimentelle Untersuchung.

Schizophrenia, with its most common symptom of persecutory delusion, is considered a severe psychotic disorder, and persecutory thoughts are also represented in the general population. Based on the assumption that negative emotions and fear in particular are closely related and have a causal influence on the development and maintenance of persecutory delusion, this study chose to investigate the regulation of negative emotions in humans. The aim of this study was to investigate which emotion regulation strategies are preferred in a healthy sample and which strategies reduce anxiety more successfully. In addition, possible connections between ideas of persecution and the increased use of attention-grabbing strategies should be highlighted. The study involved 40 subjects without any diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder. The data were collected using various questionnaires and a computer experiment. For the computer experiment, validated images from the IAPS database were used to induce anxiety. Subjects were asked to regulate anxiety through the following four strategies learned during the study session. These were divided into two groups: Distraction and viewing as strategies using attention; acceptance and reassessment as cognitive strategies. Before and after the application of the strategy, the respondents were asked to assess their fear and paranoia on a scale from -3.00 to +3.00. A significant result was shown in the preferred use of reappraisal over distraction. No significant habitually preferred use of distraction as an attention-getting strategy was found in healthy subjects who were more likely to agree with paranoid statements. In subjects with increased approval values of paranoid beliefs, no worse success in reducing anxiety was shown by using the strategy reappraisal compared to those with lower levels of consent to paranoid beliefs. Furthermore, it could not be shown that subjects with higher approval rating for paranoid beliefs were less successful in reducing anxiety than those with lower approval ratings using the strategy of distraction. In regards to further research in the field of emotion regulation, the results of this study highlight the importance of using multi-method measurement instruments is postulated in order to be able to record both emotion-spanning and emotion- specific emotion regulation competencies. Furthermore, future research studies should aim to investigate deficits in emotion regulation. Another important discussion should include the consideration of integrating training on emotion regulation in clinical and subclinical groups into therapy concepts as well as making it accessible to non-clinical groups.