Trower and Chadwick (1995) argued that there are two types of paranoia: 'poor me', in which persecution is seen as undeserved, and 'bad me', in which it is perceived to be deserved. These authors outlined a theory which accounts for both types of paranoia and makes predictions regarding their stability. To investigate the phenomenology of deservedness of persecution in both clinical and non-clinical populations (i.e. categorically vs. dimensionally distributed; changeable vs. stable over time), and to examine whether different degrees of deservedness are associated with different psychological constructs and cognitive processes, as predicted by the different accounts of paranoia, (ii) To devise a new measure that assesses both the severity of paranoia and its deservedness in clinical and non clinical populations.