Week 4.1: Cognitive bias in affective disorders Flashcards
The mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
Cognition
The term comes from the Latin word “cognoscere,” which means “to know.”
Cognition
What are the key processes in cognition?
Attention
Memory
Interpretation
Reasoning
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or information.
Attention
The process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information.
Memory
The act of making sense of sensory information.
Interpretation
The process of drawing conclusions and making decisions based on information.
Reasoning
What are the types of Memory?S
Short-term Memory and Long-term Memory
Retains information for a short period.
Short-term Memory
Stores information for extended periods.
Long-term Memory
What are the two divisions of long-term memory?
Declarative Memory and Procedural Memory
Knowledge acquired through language and education, or personal experiences.
Declarative Memory
Knowledge of how to perform tasks through routines.
Procedural Memory
The tendency for our information processing system to consistently favor certain types of information or stimuli.
There are up to 175 different biases identified.
Cognitive Bias
These biases often relate to enduring personality characteristics or current states.
Cognitive Bias
Why do some people develop Anxiety and Depression?
Vulnerabilities: Certain people are more vulnerable due to a combination of biological and social risk factors.
Linked to all anxiety disorders and can manifest as irritability.
Neuroticism
These biases can contribute to the development and maintenance of anxiety and depression.
Cognitive Bias
Are like mental shortcuts that can lead us to focus more on certain types of information.
Cognitive Biases
A core personality trait characterized by emotional instability, anxiety, self-doubt, irritability, and other negative feelings
Neuroticism
Tend to experience heightened levels of stress and worry, making them more susceptible to developing anxiety disorders
Individuals high in Neuroticism
People with high levels of neuroticism often exhibit this, which means they may become easily annoyed or angered by minor frustrations
Irritability
Is like having a sensitive emotional alarm system.
People with heightened levels of such are more likely to feel anxious and stressed, and they may get irritated easily by things that others might not find bothersome.
Neuroticism
A model that explains how genetic and environmental factors contribute to the development of diseases or traits.
Vulnerability Threshold Model
Refers to the genetic predisposition or risk for a particular trait or disease.
This liability is normally distributed across the population, meaning most people have an average level of risk, while fewer people have very high or very low levels of risk.
Genetic Liability
A specific point on the liability scale. Individuals whose genetic liability exceeds this threshold are likely to develop the disease or trait.
Those with liability below this threshold will not manifest the disease.
Threshold Liability
External factors that can influence an individual’s liability.
These factors can either increase or decrease the risk of developing the disease, depending on the individual’s genetic vulnerabilities.
Environmental Factors
Can shift an individual’s liability towards or away from the threshold, meaning that a person’s risk level can change over time.
Environmental factors
What factors are at play in the development of mental disorders?
Genetic factors provide a baseline level of risk, while environmental factors can influence whether or not that risk leads to the development of a disorder.
Attention is easily captured by even mild threats, leading to a constant stream of anxiety-inducing information.
Vigilant Processing Mode
Ignore threatening information, thus experiencing less anxiety
Avoidant Mode
What is the connection between anxiety and depression, and memory/phenomena?
Anxiety: More associated with attentional phenomena.
Depression: More associated with memory phenomena, particularly the recall of negative past experiences.
The aspect of memory that involves the recollection of personal experiences and past events.
Autobiographical Memory
What is the connection between depression and memory?
The more severe the depression, the quicker the patient retrieved an unpleasant memory.
What is the connection between memories and suicidal patients?
When asked to recall memories, instead of providing detailed stories, suicidal patients might give broad, non-specific answers. This could be due to their emotional state affecting their ability to remember specific details.
A cognitive task where subjects name the ink color of words as quickly and accurately as possible while ignoring the word’s meaning.
Stroop Task
Used to investigate interference effects of emotional material on cognitive processing
Stroop Task
A tendency for individuals to respond to questions or tasks in a certain way that is influenced by factors other than the actual content of the question or task.
This bias affects the final response rather than the initial thought process.
Response Bias
A cognitive task used to measure attentional bias towards threatening stimuli.
Attention Dot-Probe Task
Anxious individuals have their attention captured by threat-related cues, affecting their performance on tasks
Automatic Attention
When faced with threats, anxious individuals often exhibit heightened alertness and can respond more quickly to potential dangers.
Hypervigilance
An elevated state of constantly being on the lookout for potential threats. It is often associated with anxiety and other mental health conditions
Hypervigilance
The tendency to select more threatening meanings of ambiguous events is a characteristic of individuals prone to anxiety.
Anxious individuals are more likely to see the negative side of ambiguous situations.
A consistent bias towards negative interpretations can make the world seem more threatening.
Threat Perception of Anxious Individuals
The tendency to interpret ambiguous situations or information in a way that aligns with one’s pre-existing beliefs or emotions.
This often means seeing neutral or unclear events as more negative or threatening than they actually are
Interpretation Bias
What is the connection between reading times and anxiety?
Anxious people are quicker to understand and react to negative continuations of ambiguous sentences because their minds are already primed to expect the worst.
Cognitive structures which influence a person’s perceptions, interpretations, and memories.
Schema
What is the key cognitive difference between anxiety and depression?
In depression, the prominent schemas have something to do with negative views of the self, the world, and the future.
In anxiety, the key schemata are about vulnerability and danger.
Complex sets of underlying stable attitudes and assumptions, and they
originate from very early experiences and are stored in the long-term memory.
Schema
They are like mental frameworks that shape our understanding of the world
Schema
Help organize incoming information by using existing knowledge to interpret new information
Schema
A theory that explains how emotions, concepts, and events are interconnected in memory through associative pathways
Bower’s Network Theory
What is the difference in the cognitive biases between anxiety and depression?
Anxiety: Focused primarily on potential negative events in the future.
Bias: Anxious individuals tend to focus more on potential threats and dangers that might occur.
Depression: Focused primarily on negative thoughts and experiences from the past.
Bias: Depressed individuals tend to recall more negative past experiences.
Think of your brain as a network of interconnected points (nodes) and lines (pathways). Each point represents an emotion, concept, or event, and the lines show how they are related.
Associative Connections
Connections between nodes that describe the relationships between different concepts.
Pathways
Represents emotions, concepts, and events within a network
Nodes
An automatic process where a stimulus (like a word) activates related components in long-term memory without conscious effort.
Example: Seeing the word “doctor” might automatically make you think of “nurse” or “hospital.”
Priming
A conscious and strategic effort to deepen your understanding and memory of the concept.
Example: When studying, you might consciously link new information to what you already know to better understand and remember it.
Elaboration
Memory that involves conscious recollection of past events and requires elaborative processes.
Example: Remembering what you had for dinner last night.
Explicit Memory
Memory that does not involve conscious recollection and often relies on priming and automatic processes.
Example: Knowing how to ride a bike without consciously thinking about the steps involved.
Implicit Memory
What are the results of Williams and colleagues (1997) study on he effect of anxiety and depression on emotional processing?
Depressed Patients: Show an explicit memory bias, meaning they are more likely to consciously recall threatening or negative material.
Anxious Individuals: Show an implicit memory bias, meaning they are more likely to have automatic, unconscious responses to threatening material.
The tendency to pay more attention to certain types of information while ignoring others.
Attentional Bias
Early stage of information processing that occurs before conscious awareness.
Ex. When you walk into a room, you might automatically notice a bright red object without consciously looking for it
Pre-attentive Processing
A process that evaluates the emotional significance (threat value or negativity) of a stimulus.
Ex. Seeing a snarling dog, your brain quickly assesses it as a threat, triggering a fear response even before you consciously think about it.
Affective Decision Mechanism
A process that directs attention based on the evaluated threat level.
Ex. If you hear a loud noise while studying, your attention shifts to the noise to determine if it’s a threat, even if you were deeply focused on your work.
Resource Allocation Mechanism
What are the two Pre-attentive Processing Stages?
1) Threat Value Computation and Influence of Current State Anxiety
2) Resource Allocation and Influence of Trait Anxiety
Your brain quickly decides how dangerous or negative something is.
Example: Seeing a snake, your brain instantly evaluates it as a high-threat situation.
Threat Value Computation
If you’re already anxious, your brain is more likely to see things as threatening.
Example: If you’re feeling anxious, even a harmless garden hose might be mistaken for a snake.
Influence of Current State Anxiety
If something seems very threatening, your brain focuses your attention on it.
Resource Allocation
Your long-term anxiety levels affect how you focus your attention.
Influence of Trait Anxiety
What are the different trait anxieties?
High Trait Anxiety: You tend to focus more on threats.
Example: Someone with high anxiety might constantly scan their environment for potential dangers.
Low Trait Anxiety: You tend to ignore minor threats.
Example: Someone with low anxiety might not notice or worry as much and continue with their activities.
Situations that can be interpreted in both positive and negative ways.
Ex. Receiving a message saying, “We need to talk.”
Ambiguous Emotional Events
The idea that different interpretations of an event compete with each other, and one interpretation will dominate.
Ex. When you hear a noise at night, your brain might quickly decide whether it’s a harmless sound or a potential threat.
Competitive Processes in Attention
A natural tendency to favor one type of interpretation over another.
In-built Bias
The part of the brain that assesses whether something is a threat.
Threat Evaluation System
What is the bias towards positive interpretations?
For Most People: There is a natural bias towards positive interpretations.
In Anxious Individuals: The threatening interpretation is more likely to dominate.
People can try to focus on positive interpretations to inhibit the negative ones.
Possible Control
A training method designed to change interpretation biases by repeatedly exposing individuals to ambiguous scenarios and guiding them towards positive interpretations.
Example: Participants might repeatedly complete stories in a positive way, such as thinking new people they meet will find them friendly instead of boring.
Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM)
What are the effects of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) Training?
Significantly alter how individuals interpret ambiguous situations, making them more likely to choose positive interpretations.
Promoting a positive interpretation bias can lead to reductions in symptoms such as anxiety, worry, and intrusive memories
Interpretations of ambiguous situations that are neutral or positive, rather than harmful or threatening.
Benign Meanings
A person’s general tendency to experience anxiety across various situations.
Trait Anxiety
