# Using Multimodal Neuroimaging and Real-World Experience Sampling to Understand Negative Affect and Paranoid Ideation in Psychosis

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK · 2020 · $797,694

## Abstract

Paranoid ideation—the mistaken belief that intentional harm is likely to occur—spans a continuum, from mild
suspicion to persecutory delusions. Among patients with schizophrenia and other psychosis disorders, elevated
levels of paranoia are common, debilitating, and challenging to treat. The cues (public environments, strangers)
and processes (anxiety) that promote paranoia have grown increasingly clear, but the brain bases of these
pathways are unknown, thwarting the development of mechanistic models and, ultimately, the development of
more effective or tolerable biological interventions. Leveraging our team’s unique multidisciplinary expertise and
productive track record of NIH-sponsored research, this project will use an innovative combination of paranoia
assessments, advanced neuroimaging techniques, and smartphone-based experience sampling to clarify the
factors governing paranoia. We will enroll the full spectrum of paranoia without gaps or discontinuities—including
psychosis patients with frank persecutory delusions and matched community controls. These data will allow us
to rigorously examine the hypothesized contribution of brain circuits responsible for triggering anxiety and
evaluating the threat potential of everyday social cues, such as faces. Integrating neuroimaging measures with
experience-sampling data will enable us to extend these insights to the real world—a key step to establishing
therapeutic relevance—for the first time. It has become increasingly clear that categorical psychiatric diagnoses
(e.g. schizophrenia) present significant barriers to understanding pathophysiology. Our focus on dimensional
measures of paranoia overcomes many of these barriers and dovetails with the National Institute of Mental
Health’s Strategic Objectives and Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative. This work would provide a
potentially transformative opportunity to test and refine theory, deepen our understanding of etiology, guide the
development of new translational models, discover new treatment targets, and provide an integrative
biopsychosocial framework for unifying research across investigators, approaches, and scholarly guilds.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10051559
- **Project number:** 1R01MH121409-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK
- **Principal Investigator:** JACK J. BLANCHARD
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $797,694
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-06-01 → 2025-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10051559

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10051559, Using Multimodal Neuroimaging and Real-World Experience Sampling to Understand Negative Affect and Paranoid Ideation in Psychosis (1R01MH121409-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10051559. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*