Paranoid Personality Disorder Test (Revised Green)
How the Scales are Structured
Who Usually Takes This Test?
See How You Compare
Below is a preview of how scores are typically distributed across each scale.
Example Questions From the Test
- Totally untrue
- Untrue
- Somewhat true
- True
- Totally true
- Completely untrue
- Untrue
- Somewhat
- True
- Completely true
- Not at all true
- Untrue
- Somewhat
- True
- Completely true
Paranoid Personality Disorder Test (Revised Green) - Description and methodology of the test
People who notice recurring mistrust, threat interpretations, or a sense that others act against them may use this paranoid personality disorder test to examine those experiences in a structured way. It organizes suspicious thoughts and perceived hostility into a two-scale profile, making this suspicious thoughts assessment useful for personal reflection. The result compares endorsement across those dimensions and shows which pattern is more prominent.
What This Assessment Explores
The questions describe others gossiping, judging, avoiding, hinting, staring, following, conspiring, or intending harm. Some mention feeling upset or angry in these contexts, but scores read the two defined tendencies, not emotional impact itself.
Someone trying to understand recurring suspicious interpretations can use this persecutory thinking assessment: each band's level shows the degree of endorsement within its dimension.
The profile contains two scales:
- Persecutory Ideation (0-40) assesses beliefs that others persecute or treat the respondent with hostility; Low is 0-10, Moderate is 11-27, and High is 28-40. Scores above 18 may indicate risk of paranoid personality disorder.
- Ideas of Reference (0-32) assesses a tendency to interpret neutral events as personally relevant; Low is 0-15, Moderate is 16-24, and High is 25-32. Higher scores may indicate stronger paranoid ideation; lower scores align with typical levels.
Methodology and Scientific Basis
Each first-person statement uses five ordered choices from complete untruth to complete truth. This records degree of endorsement, not a yes-or-no answer. Responses are organized into two dimensions, but the questionnaire does not present an item-by-item weighting method; interpretation follows the displayed scales and bands.
The method is conceptually consistent with R-GPTS, the revised form of the earlier GPTS approach. Freeman and colleagues' 2021 R-GPTS study and Green and colleagues' 2008 GPTS study address persecution and social reference. This online questionnaire is not established as equivalent to the published instrument or presented as a direct adaptation.
This questionnaire distinguishes persecutory experiences from ideas of reference: the former concern perceived hostility or harm, while the latter concern personal meaning assigned to neutral events. The dimensions may overlap without being identical. Schlier and colleagues' 2024 study extends evidence across cultures, but establishes no norms for this online version.
Current stress, memory, expectations, and willingness to disclose can influence self-report, while the questionnaire cannot show why an interpretation occurs or how it affects functioning. Its displayed bands should not be treated as a diagnosis.
- Freeman, D., Loe, B. S., Kingdon, D., Startup, H., Molodynski, A., Rosebrock, L., Brown, P., Sheaves, B., Waite, F., & Bird, J. C. (2021). The revised Green et al., Paranoid Thoughts Scale (R-GPTS): psychometric properties, severity ranges, and clinical cut-offs. Psychological Medicine, 51(2), 244-253. 10.1017/S0033291719003155
- Green, C. E. L., Freeman, D., Kuipers, E., Bebbington, P. E., Fowler, D. G., Dunn, G., & Garety, P. A. (2008). Measuring ideas of persecution and social reference: the Green et al. Paranoid Thought Scales (GPTS). Psychological Medicine, 38(1), 101-111. 10.1017/S0033291707001638
- Schlier, B., Lincoln, T. M., Kingston, J. L., So, S. H., Gaudiano, B. A., Morris, E. M. J., & Ellett, L. (2024). Cross-cultural validation of the revised Green et al., paranoid thoughts scale. Psychological Medicine, 54(9), 1985-1991. 10.1017/S0033291724000072
Updated: