Spanish words with a paranoid content: Frequency of use, emotionality and specificity with respect to depressive contents

Abstract

Experimental research on the psychopathology of paranoia frequently uses verbal stimuli. Therefore, the availability of well validated databases of words specifically related to paranoid disorders would be a highly useful tool for researchers. The goal of this study was to provide such database of Spanish paranoia-related words. A second goal was to select words related to paranoia but not to depression as it is possible that words with paranoid content may have a depressive content as well (e.g., ‘humili-ated’). Thus, we report two different studies. In Study 1, our goal was to select a sample of words spe-cifically related to paranoid contents but not related to depression. In Study 2, our goal was to provide two basic psycholinguistic indexes (subjective frequency of use and emotionality) for the sample of words selected in Study 1. We finally provide the lists of words empirically selected following this pro-cedure and discuss the utility of this type of stimuli for future research on paranoid-related disorders