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Perceived ostracism and paranoia: A test of potential moderating effects of psychological flexibility and inflexibility

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Abstract

Ostracism is known to lead to negative psychological outcomes; however, little is known as to how ostracism may be a predictor of paranoid thoughts. The present paper examined the relationship between perceived ostracism and paranoid thoughts (social reference, persecution) by focusing on the potential moderating roles of psychological flexibility and inflexibility. As expected, data from a sample of 315 internet users (Mage = 31.5 years) showed that perceived ostracism was positively related to both social reference and persecution. Psychological flexibility did not moderate the ostracism-paranoid thought relationships. However, psychological inflexibility was a moderator of the ostracism-social reference relationship, but not for ostracism-persecution. Specifically, at both high and low levels of psychological inflexibility, there was a significant positive relationship between ostracism and social reference. These unexpected findings suggest that future research is needed to elucidate the mechanisms by which perceived ostracism may lead to paranoia.

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Data availability

Data is available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

  1. The sole attention check item was chosen to be embedded within the R-GPTS (Freeman et al., 2021).

  2. Sociodemographic factors such as age and sex are known to moderate the distress associated with ostracism (e.g., Hitlan et al., 2006; Sebastian et al., 2010). We tested a path analysis model including these factors and there were no substantive differences in the results.

  3. As the relationships between perceived ostracism and paranoid thoughts were so strong we ran an additional model testing the reverse effects (i.e., paranoid thoughts predicting perceived ostracism). It was found that psychological inflexibility and psychological flexibility were not significant moderators in this model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Coventry University, Coventry, UK

    Daniel Waldeck & James Adie

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Luca Pancani

  3. School of Psychology & Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Eric M. J. Morris

  4. Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK

    Andrew Holliman

  5. Department of Psychology, University of Chichester, Chichester, PO196PE, West Sussex, UK

    Ian Tyndall

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  1. Daniel Waldeck
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Waldeck, D., Pancani, L., Morris, E.M.J. et al. Perceived ostracism and paranoia: A test of potential moderating effects of psychological flexibility and inflexibility. Curr Psychol 42, 29138–29148 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04008-8

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