9 Signs That Someone Is Too Suspicious

Source: Mohamed Hassan/Pixabay

When you look around at your environment, there can be many reasons to be cautious about possible risks. Perhaps you’re traveling for the first time in what seems like forever to visit family, a trip that will require you to go through crowded airports. Although being among hundreds, if not thousands, of people in one place never used to bother you, now you can’t stop thinking about the harm that might come to you as you navigate not only the airports but also the streets of the city where your family lives. With everything from COVID-19 to security issues to worry about, it’s no wonder that your mind wanders to worst-case scenarios.

It's one thing to imagine yourself in these situations and then another to experience them. You may have conquered your reluctance to set out on this trip, but once in those crowded situations, you find yourself completely on edge, looking around constantly for possible warning signs that you’re in danger. However, although it seems potentially reasonable for you to feel this way, think back on your pre-COVID self and ask whether this mindset was typical for you back then. Were you always someone who saw danger where no danger was to be found?

Attention Bias and the Perception of Threat

According to Tel Aviv University’s Omer Azriel and colleagues (2022), people high in what’s called “threat-related attention bias” approach situations such as those you might encounter on this trip with “the tendency to preferentially allocate attention to threatening over benign stimuli in the environment.” As the term “attention bias” implies, this sensitivity to threat leads you to latch immediately onto possible sources of harm rather than sources of pleasure. Walking through that airport, if you’re high in this tendency, you’d look suspiciously at the faces and movements of people who approach you, rather than, for example, the cuddly stuffed animals on the rack in the gift shop.

Having this bias could be protective, of course, but as the Israeli research team points out, it can also make you more likely to experience such threats to your mental health as the development of depression and anxiety, among other disturbances in your ability to enjoy life. Wouldn’t it be nicer to let one of those cute teddy bears enter your field of vision instead of the endless sea of masked faces?

Azriel and his team, noting that there were no established measures of threat-related attention bias, decided to embark on a series of studies to provide a simple test that would not only capture this perceptual tendency but also predict people’s behavior in actual settings.

9 Items That Can Detect Your Own Attentional Bias

Beginning with a set of 31 candidate items based on suggestions from clinical researchers, the Tel Aviv U. authors proceeded to narrow their possible test down to 15 items, which they then administered to an online sample of 350 adults (18–67 years old, average age 27). After performing the requisite statistical tests, the research team arrived at the following nine-item Attention Bias Questionnaire (ABQ). Test yourself by responding from 0 (“not at all”) to 4 (“to a great extent”):

1. It is difficult for me not to look at threatening things.
2. Sometimes, I notice threats even before I have looked at them directly (e.g., from the corner of my eye).
3. My attention tends to “get stuck” on threatening things.
4. I notice threats quickly.
5. I am vigilant and alert toward threats in my surroundings.
6. When I arrive somewhere new, I scan my surroundings and check for threats.
7. If I notice a threat, I will focus on it for a long time.
8. It is difficult for me to concentrate on other things when I know there is a threat in my surroundings.
9. When I notice threats, it is difficult for me to stop focusing on them.

These nine items statistically fall into two groups: difficulty to disengage from threat (items 1, 3, 7, 8, and 9) and engagement with threat (items 2, 4, 5, and 6). The average score was 1.74 for difficulty to disengage and slightly higher, 1.8, for engagement with threat. Most people scored between about 1 and 2.8 per item. Therefore, if you were scoring yourself with a fair number of 4s, you would be on the high end of the ABQ.

In subsequent studies, the authors examined the relationship between ABQ scores and a range of measures of personality, trauma-related symptoms, hypervigilance, and psychopathology. Supporting the validity of the ABQ, over both dimensions, people with high scores also had high scores on a post-traumatic checklist scale, neuroticism, overall anxiety, and social anxiety, and they also reported more symptoms of depression.

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As impressive as these findings are, the authors sought to establish the predictive value of ABQ scores on a piece of observable behavior. They did so by presenting one group of participants (311 males enlisting for military service) with an eye-tracking task involving sets of 16 black-and-white photos of faces, divided in half between angry and neutral expressions. This paradigm allowed the authors to measure whether the participants fixated more on the angry faces, both in terms of gazing at more of them and spending more time per gaze.

The ABQ performed as expected in this behavioral task, showing positive correlations both with dwell time and fixation on angry faces, but it was the difficulty to disengage from threat subscale that showed the strongest relationship. The sizes of these relationships, though statistically significant, were small, leading the authors to comment on the difficulty of showing any type of relationship between a self-report and lab-based behavioral task.

In interpreting this last finding, the authors note that the lab-based test was just one manifestation of attentional bias toward threat. More generally, “the ABQ scores likely reflect a subjective integration of accumulated past experiences in which preferential attention towards threats had consciously emerged.” In other words, when taking the ABQ, you’re clearly aware of your answers, but when someone puts you in a lab and asks you to look at certain stimuli, you are operating according to a different set of processes, potentially ones that are unconscious.

How to Lower Your Own Threat Levels

Given that ABQ scores have a relationship not only to behavior but also to key measures of psychological health, it may be worth taking stock of your own hypervigilance to threat and seeing how you can expand your horizons to other, more pleasant, aspects of your environment.

To do so, go back through those questions again and ask yourself how automatic those responses are for you. Do you assume that it’s best to be on the lookout for things that could harm you, and never even doubt whether this is the right approach?

It’s possible, of course, that you have learned, through those “accumulated past experiences” that it’s best to prepare for the worst, and so even though you know these responses alter your ability to enjoy life, you believe that they’re necessary. Certainly, the last two years of the pandemic have put everyone on edge, particularly people who have taken lockdown and other prevention-related measures more seriously than others. At the same time, though, is it possible to let down your guard just a little in terms of your level of worry? If you try this in stages, you might be surprised at just how much better you feel.

To sum up, without throwing caution to the wind, being able to look at the rewards rather than the threats in your surroundings can be a valuable way to preserve your mental health. Taking your threat down a notch, or maybe even more, can help you gain the fulfillment that comes from enjoying all the richness of experiences that life has to offer.

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