Blog 2 – Week 2 – Researching Paranoia

After the group meeting on Tuesday 6^th October 2009, key areas of research were identified and each group member was assigned an area to study. I was tasked with summarising parts of the book, “Cognitive Therapy for Delusions, Voices and Paranoia” by Paul Chadwick, Max Birchwood and Peter Trower. I managed to take note of a large amount of introductory information on the subject in the first chapter alone, and so Robert Lambert, my teammate tasked with the same assignment chose to summarise the rest of the relevant chapters. Here is a Cmap of my research on Chapter 1 along with a summary of the information including my opinions on the matter which will hopefully strive to define the characteristics of Paranoia so that we might be able to identify and acknowledge its presence. The full document of my research can be found on our forums, here: http://teammercury.phpbbhosts.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6.

Essentially then, my research of chapter 1 seems to be based off of very brief summaries of previous studies and research. The foundation of paranoia seems to have been agreed upon the ABC Model (Ellis, 1962) where A stands for Activating event, B stands for belief and C stands for emotional or behavioural Consequence. The As, Bs and Cs usually occur as one unified experience so beliefs on their own do not cause feelings/emotional distress. The predominant beliefs that are found to inflict most people are the beliefs about a psychological of physical threat, a belief about loss or a belief about the infringement of rights. If Team Mercury could incorporate these beliefs into experiments within a game, and by even directly implementing the ABC Model itself if possible acknowledging our need to consider ethics, we may be able to use these as milestones for our project.

To define B within the ABC Model, "in our cognitive therapy we include four cognitions: Images, Inferences, Evaluations and Dysfunctional assumptions."

Images – “a man who has trouble speaking in public imagines himself fainting when giving a speech.” Public speaking is a common fear, if Team Mercury could prompt negative foreboding images of common fears within an experiment, this may prove informative.

Inferences – “hypotheses which can be true or false and occur in abbreviated, often crude language. E.g. he hates me, I'll fail, the bastards are at it again. All inferences go beyond the factual evidence. One way of making an inference is by means of an attribution.”

Unstable attribution - will only happen once
Stable attribution - will always happen
Specific attribution - the failure was just a deficiency in [the area e.g maths]
Global attribution - a general failing

Mood can affect inferences, causing six identifiable errors:

1. Arbitrary inference – “a specific conclusion is drawn quite arbitrarily.”
2. Selective abstraction – “client focuses on a detail taken out of context, ignoring other salient features and conceptualising the whole experience on the basis of this fragment.”
3. Overgeneralisation – “the pattern of drawing a general rule or conclusion on the basis of one or more isolated incidents and applying the conclusion to virtually all situations.”
4. Magnification and minimisation – “gross errors in evaluating the significance of an event.”
5. Personalisation – “client's tendency to relate external events to himself, blames himself.”
6. Absolutistic, dichotomous or black-and-white thinking – “tendency to place everything into one of two opposite categories. An error is a catastrophe; a failure is a complete failure.”

These inferences are generally made by the individual, whilst Team Mercury may not be able to provoke specific inferences, we may be able to predict them through use of gestalt awareness exercises.

Evaluation – “a good-bad judgement, or a preference as opposed to an inference (Zajonc, 1980) e.g. I prefer John to David, John did a bad thing.”

Different evaluation = different behaviour e.g. Failing a driving test, of I condemn myself as a failure I will experience depression, if I regret the outcome and resolve to become better I will experience disappointment, and blaming the instructor as a fool will make me experience anger.

Person evaluations – “stable, global and total condemnations of an entire person, made in one of three ways - 'other to self', 'self to self' and 'self to other'. It is not behaviour being judged but the entire person.”

The authors of the book have developed their own self-report measure of person evaluations, the Evaluative Beliefs Scale (EBScale – Chadwick and Trower, 1993). This measures the three directions of person evaluations (other-self, self-self, self-other) and covers the major areas of interpersonal concern, namely: unlovability, failure, inferiority, badness, weakness."

If Team Mercury could incorporate the EBScale into testing then this would help us to measure certain evaluations, as we have little control over initiating a specific evaluation within an individual as it is. Creating tests that focus on interpersonal concerns would likely be informative however we must consider the ethics of involving such aspects.

Dysfunctional assumptions – “fundamental rules or principles which guide behaviour. They are thought to have their origins in childhood and are therefore usually implicit but may be deduced from an individual's interpersonal behaviour. E.g. a depressed woman devotes her life to pleasing others and subjugates her own wishes and feelings. When she 'inferred' she had upset someone, she would feel despairing and empty, believe she would always be alone and unlovable, a 'non-person'. Her dysfunctional assumption might be - 'In order to be a complete person I must have others around me.' Following from this, she never risked upsetting others from fear of rejection. Through cognitive therapy, she linked this with her childhood and her parents neglecting her and had slowly grown to care for them and others to avoid those painful feelings.”

Five Fundamental Principles of the ABC Model

1. All clinical psychological problems are Cs.

2. Problems arise from Bs, not As.

"The cognitive model asserts that Cs are not products of events (As), but reflect the personal meaning (Bs) the event has had for the individual. In other words people's actions and feelings (C) arise from their interpretations of events, and are not inevitable consequences of those events."
“A cognition (B) cant cause cause a behaviour (C) because it is not an entity” (Searle, 1983)

3. There are predictable connections between Bs and Cs.

4. Core Bs arise from early experience
One important conclusion – “early relationships have a profound impact and for the majority of patients it is here that the origin of their problem lies.”

“We believe the most fundamental Bs (dysfunctional assumptions and person-evaluations) are laid down in early life and reflect the amount of attachment (closeness) and autonomy (self-definition) the child has.”

Whilst we have no power in affecting the dysfunctional assumptions in those we test, we can maybe create our own temporary ones by having something occur early on within a test to make the individual aware of it, and create a belief of threat within the individual from the game that it may return anytime throughout the duration of the test.

5. Weakening beliefs weakens associated distress and disturbance. This is something Team Mercury must avoid if we are to identify what areas of the game environment create Paranoia. Immersion is a highly important factor for a game to create fear and paranoia.

References

- Chadwick, P. Birchwood, M. & Trower, P., 1996. Cognitive Therapy for Delusions, Voices and Paranoia. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Blog 1 - Week 1 - Understanding Paranoia and Formulating Ideas

How does an ‘in-game’ environment encourage feelings of paranoia? This is the project assigned to my group, Team Mercury, for this year’s module of Level Design 3 Team Project. Our initial impulse was to define paranoia, and according to Dictionary.com it is “A psychotic disorder characterized by delusions of persecution with or without grandeur, often strenuously defended with apparent logic and reason” or “an extreme, irrational distrust of others”. We shared our own personal opinions on where we believed paranoia existed in video games, Silent Hill and Condemned received notable mentions. I, however, instantly picked Alien Trilogy on the Playstation 1 as my game of choice for instilling a belief in the player that they were going to be attacked.

The project proposal mentioned examining paranoia in other forms of entertainment such as movies and books, so I honestly couldn’t have thought of a better franchise than Aliens for examining paranoia. The film ‘Aliens’ was released in 1986, and I remember clear examples of paranoia within the film, such as the marine’s motion sensor which is practically infamous these days for meaning bad news. As it can detect any motion, even from non-hostile targets, it prompts a reaction within the characters to ready their weapons and prepare to defend themselves. The bleep on their sensor turned out to be a mouse, and later on it found Newt, the orphaned child. Both examples created a tense piece of footage to sit through.

Besides the motion sensor, the whole environment was particularly important in creating a sense of foreboding. Lighting, sound effects and the design of the setting were all essential in creating that atmosphere. The light was always dim or red when the possibility of danger lurked, whereas it was light and clear during safe parts. The sound effects of the film were so effective; I would imagine they are instantly recognisable amongst most teenagers and adults today. The bleeping of the motion sensor, the hissing of a nearby Alien and their trumpet-like screams and the distinct sound of a pulse rifle restoring order were all used with great effect. The design of the setting, the base on LV-426, made use of long, dark, repetitive corridors and hardly any form of cover for protection. At times it almost felt claustrophobic when watching a squad of marines attempt to traverse them whilst on-guard.

Imagine then, if the same mechanics that made the characters paranoid and the viewers forced into hiding behind pillows and covers were transferred into a game. As a general rule of thumb for action/horror/survival games, immersion is one the main keys to success. Make the player believe they are the ones on-screen. Base it on the Alien films, and you had a sure-fire game to create paranoia. The initial first viewing of a movie or playing of a game is always the most important in becoming emotionally attached to it. Alien Trilogy was released on the Playstation in 1996, and I must’ve played it when I was around 10 years old or so. On my very first go, my sensor bleeped and I froze, suddenly wondering why I was playing a game based off a film that terrified me. I shot down the first facehugger and began to move slowly forwards. When my sensor went off again, I had had enough. I left myself standing on the corpse of the facehugger so that she (Ellen Ripley) would eventually die from the acidic corpse, thus saving me from playing the game any further.

I played it again a few years later and did quite a bit better this time, having grown out of my Alien fears and found it to be a very atmospheric game almost exactly like the films. The lighting was always dim or completely pitch black at times, and I had to rely on my motion sensor constantly. The sound effects were genuinely creepy, from the scuttling of a facehugger to the hissing and screeching of the proper aliens, or Xenomorphs as they are referred to in the game. The music has an eerie tone which really helps to expand upon the tense atmosphere and the level design implemented long, thin, repetitive corridors with many corners to accommodate the creepy crawlies. At times it became cramped which created a sense of dread knowing that the time would come when you would have to back off from an incoming xenomorph to avoid its attacks and acidic blood.

Unfortunately the game doesn’t stand the test of time. Having replayed it briefly for the purpose of understanding its techniques better, it’s become painfully clear to me how awkward and sluggish the controls were, how bland the environments were in comparison with similar games like Alien vs Predator on the PC and how awful the xenomorphs looked. They were horribly pixelated sprites with basic animations and the level design was erratic at best, and most levels were straight forward and on the short side. The plot was strange, incorporating the first 3 Alien movie plots into one game, and the lighting, or rather the lack of it only serves to annoy. I can’t help but feel like a piece of my childhood has died by replaying this game after studying games design. My tastes and standards were so much more welcoming towards games as a child. The only thing I can still stand by is the sound effects and music of the game which still to this day instil me with an uneasy feeling. I have briefly played Aliens vs Predator 1 on the PC roughly 2 years ago which left me as a quivering wreck before even the first level was over, unfortunately due to compatibility issues, I had to uninstall it. Instead, I look forward to testing a later incarnation of the series which will hopefully be more stable, and for the releases of Aliens vs Predator (being developed by Rebellion Developments, the team behind the 1999 original PC game) and Aliens: Colonial Marines (being developed by Gearbox Software).



In addition to testing Alien Trilogy’s environmental effects for the cause of paranoia, I have also borrowed a couple of books from the library. “Creating Emotions in Games” by David Freeman will hopefully expand upon the techniques used to create feelings such as paranoia, and “Cognitive Therapy for Delusions, Voices and Paranoia” by Paul Chadwick, Max Birchwood and Peter Trower offers a more academic view of paranoia which I will study, with the aim of hopefully being able to properly understand paranoia and be able to identify it when the time for testing our theories comes round. The book states that, “The central point is that responses to events are mediated by thoughts, images and beliefs.” So if the environmental effects of a video game can effects the player’s thoughts and beliefs, then maybe the images will be able to cause paranoid reactions. The book also mentions Ellis’ (1962) ABC model for paranoia, “A stands for the “activating event”, B stands for “belief” about the activating event, and C stands for the emotional or behavioural “Consequence” that follows from the B, given A.” This framework is deceptively simple but it is a powerful and subtle model which can guide assessment, formulation and therapy of paranoia, exactly what Team Mercury needs in order to succeed. After we all understand paranoia a little better, we plan to make an appointment with the University’s psychologist Dr. John Charlton who will hopefully be able to steer us further in the right direction.

Images provided by www.grupomh.net, http://www.fpsdungeon.com and http://en.wikipedia.org respectively.