Emotions and persecutory ideation in daily life: On the trail of the "chicken and egg" problem

Etiological models highlight the importance of emotions for the emergence of persecutory ideation. To increase our understanding of their exacerbation, we tested whether this process can be explained by a vicious cycle of negative emotions and persecutory ideation in daily life. Furthermore, we examined whether this process differs in people with and without a psychotic disorder by testing a sample of 34 individuals with elevated psychotic experiences without a diagnosis (subclinical sample) and a sample of 33 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorder (clinical sample). In both samples, we applied the experience sampling method for 1 week to acquire repeated measures of sadness, fear, anger, shame, and persecutory ideation. Multilevel models showed that all tested negative emotions were associated with persecutory ideation measured at the same time point (p < .05) in both samples. Fear predicted subsequent persecutory ideation (p < .05). There was a moderating effect between sample and anger and sample and sadness predicting subsequent persecutory ideation (p < .05), with these associations being stronger in the subclinical sample. Finally, persecutory ideation predicted subsequent fear, anger, sadness, and shame (p < .05) without a moderating effect of the sample. Hence, the results showed an emotion-unspecific rather than an emotion-specific vicious cycle of negative emotions and persecutory ideation, which possibly contributes to symptom exacerbation and maintenance. Potential differences in mechanisms relating to emotions and persecutory ideation before and after the manifestation of the disorder are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).