Cognitive bias in affective disorders

Question 1

What does the latin “cognoscere” mean?

Answer 1

“to know”

Question 2

What is cognition?

Answer 2

> Ability to process information through perception

> Beliefs - subjective characteristics

> Knowledge acquired through experience

Question 3

Which cognitive process is associated with the development and maintenance of anxiety?

Answer 3

Attention

- controls and regulated other cognitive processes

Question 4

Which cognitive process is associated with the development and maintenance of depression?

Answer 4

Memory

• declarative: acquired through image and education
• procedural: acquired through routine

Question 5

What is a cognitive bias?

Answer 5

When information processing system favours the stimulus material of a particular content

Question 6

What is the bias blind spot?

Answer 6

tendency of people to see themselves as less susceptible to nonconscious predispositions and cognitive influences than others

Question 7

What are cognitive biases often related to?

Answer 7

Enduring personality characteristic

Question 8

What does does the vulnerability threshold model of disease propose?

Answer 8

On a continuum of disease liability, there’s a threshold value

• under which people won’t manifest the disease
• above which people are affected by pathological trait

Question 9

What is the influence of environmental factors in the vulnerability threshold model of disease?

Answer 9

Environmental factors could shift disease liability of individual with genetic vulnerabilities towards or away from threshold value

Question 10

What is the disease liability in the vulnerability threshold model of disease?

Answer 10

Sum of small independent effects

Question 11

How are cognitive biases a vulnerability factor in anxiety?

Answer 11

Different processing styles (bias) elicited by stressful events, cause vulnerability to anxiety

e. g.:
- Mood congruent cognitive bias: vigilant processing mood
- > Prioritised mood congruent information processing: attention captured by mild threatening cues
- > Maintains emotional disorder: increased anxiety
- > Enhances mood congruent cognitive bias (vigiland processing)

Question 12

What is the evidence on the memory bias in depression?

Answer 12

> More depressed patients trigger unpleasant memories quicker

> Severely depressed patients fail to provide specific pleasant memories
- their autobiographical memory might differ in form, content and in speed of retrieval

> Depressed patients recall unhappy memories more frequently
- less depressed patients recall happy memories more frequently

Question 13

What did the mood induction experiment of Teasdale and Fogarty (1979) with normal subjects show about the memory bias in depression?

Answer 13

Elated vs. depressed mood induction in normal subjects (randomly allocated)
-> slower recall of positive autobiographical memories

Question 14

What did dot-probe tasks testing attention bias show?

Answer 14

> Anxious people have their attention courted by threat related cues and meaning

• quicker reaction to dot when it appears in place of threatening stimuli
• > vigilance to threat

> Anxiety associated with increased attention to threat cues and greater likelihood of receiving a threatening meaning of ambiguous events

Question 15

What did Eysenck and colleagues (1991) show about biases in interpretation, using ambiguous text?

Answer 15

Anxious people interpret ambiguous words in more negative way

Question 16

What is the threat consistent continuation shown by McLeod and Cohen (1993) using sentence continuation?

Answer 16

• Anxious subjects read faster threatening continuation of ambiguous sentence
• they had already imposed mood congruent interpretations on the original sentence
• > selection of threatening meaning on ambiguous events is characteristic of anxiety
• > bias causes/maintains anxious mood
• > world is perceived as threatening

Question 17

What does Beck proposes in his schema theory?

Answer 17

Affective disorders are characterised by schema

• Anxiety: vulnerability, danger -> attention bias
• Depression: negative view of self (worthlessness), world (depriving), future (hopeless)
• > memory bias

Question 18

What is a schema?

Answer 18

Cognitive structure which influences ones perception, interpretation and memories

Question 19

What does Bower propose in his human associative memory network theory (1981)?

Answer 19

Events
- represented in memory as configurations made up of associative connections

• various connected nodes describe events
• nodes are emotions, concepts and events activated internally or externally
• activation spreads from emotion nodes to previously associated material
• mood congruent material more easily accessed
• activation above a threshold leads to conscious awareness

Question 20

Which type of biases do anxious and depressed patients show, according to Beck and Bower?

Answer 20

Global cognitive bias for all emotional states

• Anxious patients: attention bias
• Depressed patients: memory bias

Question 21

What is priming?

Answer 21

Automatic processing of stimulus

- simultaneously produces activation of various components in long term memory

Question 22

What is elaboration?

Answer 22

Later processing of stimulus

- activates related concepts

Question 23

How does depression affect memory according to Williams and colleagues (1997)?

Answer 23

Depressed patients have explicit memory bias

• retrieve threatening material
• > conscious recall of past negative events

Question 24

How does anxiety affect memory according to Williams and colleagues (1997)?

Answer 24

Anxious patients have implicit memory bias for threatening material
- through priming and automatic processes

Question 25

What did the analysis of functional differences between anxiety and depression by Williams and colleagues (1997) show?

Answer 25

Pattern of cognitive biases will differ between anxiety and depression

• Anxiety: implicit memory bias, at pre-attentive stage
• > anticipating danger
• > priority given to processing threatening stimuli
• Depression: explicit memory bias, at elaborative stage
• > processing of internally generated material associated with failure/loss

Question 26

What does the evaluation system (interpretation bias) of Mathews and Mackintosh (1998) suggest?

Answer 26

> Attention processes competing on ambiguous emotional events
- positive vs. negative/threatening evaluation systems

> “In-built” interpretation bias for most people favours positive evaluation input

> “In-built” interpretation bias in anxious people favours negative evaluative input

Question 27

What are the implications of the evaluation system of Mathews and Mackintosh (1998)?

Answer 27

It may be possible for people to exert some control over the “in-built” interpretation bias

-> intentionally apply positive interpretation/meaning and inhibit threatening ones

Question 28

What does adapting the assessment paradigms to train participant’s interpretations of stimuli consist of (Yiend et al., 2004)?

Answer 28

> Resolve ambiguous material in consistent way

> Repeated exposure to ambiguous stories

• forces disambiguation using word completion
• reinforce desired interpretation

=> Cognitive modification training

Question 29

How does cognitive training impact the interpretation bias (Mathews and Mackintosh, 2000)?

Answer 29

Facilitating more benign interpretation bias led to reductions in trait anxiety in high trait-anxious people

Question 30

What is the evidence on the treatment outcomes of CBT on emotional disorders?

Answer 30

> CBT for social anxiety disorder
-> lower negative interpretation bias scores

> CBT for panic disorder

• > reductions in catastrophic misinterpretation
• > reductions in symptom severity