Week 5 - Cognitive Biases and Self-Perception

Question 1

What do we mean by cogntitive biases?

Answer 1

Systematic errors in thinking; they affect everyone

Cognition (information processing): Attention, Perception, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval, Interpretation

Question 2

Why care about cognitive biases?

Answer 2

• Patterns of attending and thinking in anxiety and depression
• Cognitive biases in attention, interpretation, memory,
• Understanding the basic cognitive processes informs theory
• Treatment development

Question 3

What is Attentional Bias?

Answer 3

Systematic attentional selection of negative over competing neutral stimuli

Question 4

What is Interpretive Bias?

Answer 4

Tendency to interpret ambiguous information as negative

Question 5

What is Memory Bias?

Answer 5

enhanced memory performance for negative than neural information
- Implicit: relatively automatic, does not involve conscious recollection
- Explicit: effortful, conscious, recollection of events

Question 6

How can we measure attentional bias?

Answer 6

Eye-tracking can give more information on the time-course of attentional bias

Question 7

Attentional bias in anxiety

Answer 7

A positive score indicates attentional vigilance
a negative score indicates attentional avoidance

Strong evidence for attentional bias in anxiety:
- Rapid, stimulus-driven threat detection
- Combined with suboptimal cognitive control in hight anxiety

Question 8

What about in depression?

Answer 8

Mixed evidence from individual empirical studies in depression.
- Meta-analyses have suggested an overall negative attentional bias
- particularly involving impaired disengangement from negative stimuli
- The bias is stronger when stimuli are self-referenced
- Seems to be stronger at slower presentation times, suggesting involvement of more elaborative processing

Slower more elaborative biases in depression than anxiety

Cognitive biases in anxiety and depression predicted by schema theory

Question 9

Evidence of attention bias to threat in anxiety (Bar-Haim, 2007; Pergamin-Hight, 2015)

Answer 9

• Evidence for content-specificity is in line with schema theory
• Functional accounts;

Anxiety > rapid threat detection (Eysenck).

Depression > sustained thinking about lost goals > recruits more ruminative, conceptual processing (Oatley & Johnson-Laird),

Question 10

More theory

Dual-Process Models

Answer 10

**Amygdala: **
- Fast
- Automatic
- Associative
- Stimulus-Driven
- Unconscious

Prefrontal Cortext:
- Slow
- Effortful
- Reflective
- Strategic
- Regulatory
- Conscious

Question 11

Underlying brain processes

Answer 11

Brain areas show greater activation during bottom-up (red) or top-down (blue) emotional experience

Question 12

INTERPRATIVE bias in anxiety

Answer 12

Strong evidence of interpretive bias in social anxiety:

• participants with higher social anxiety tend to endorse threat interpretations of ambiguous words (e.g., growth, tank, hit) and scenarios

Interpretation bias index scores;
- threat-related interpretations minus neutral in participants with and without diagnosed generalised anxiety disorder

Question 13

Is there evidence of interpretive bias in social anxiety?

Answer 13

• Large overall effect size (Hedge’s g = 0.83)
• Some moderators, such as whether words or images were used in tests (with words yielding larger effect sizes) self referenced
• Suggestion of publication bias
• Shows association, but causal role?

OVERALL:
- Strong evidence of attentional interpretive biases in anxiety
- Interpretive bias in depression; some evidence of attentional bias using more alborative processing
- Dynamic interplay of relatively automatic and more elaborative processes seen across the different biases

Question 14

Why care about biases? Have seen that biases are associated with anxiety and depression; but do they have a causal role?

Answer 14

• To test this, we need to manipulate the bias, and test the effect symptom outcomes.
• Proposed mechanism of action: change in attentional / interpretive bias.
• Dual-platform: basic science, fundamental mechanisms and potential for therapeutic
  application.
• Can also test theoretic questions: e.g., do the biases share a common mechanism?
• Informs theory and novel intervention development.

Question 15

Effects of modifying attentional bias on anxiety:

Answer 15

Evidence that ABM can reduce anxiety
* Supports a causal role
* Recent meta-analyses weaker effects
* But larger effect sizes when mechanism of action taken into account (Grafton et al.,2017)
* Attentional bias to threat reduced > reduced anxiety
* Limitations: dot-probe reliability. A need to optimise methods.

Question 16

Effects of modifying interpretative bias:
anxiety and depression

Answer 16

• Successful at modifying interpretive bias (large effect size)
• CBM-I affects the target bias more reliably; consistent reductions in anxiety / depression, with stronger evidence for the former.
• Larger effect for studies with multiple training sessions. Bias change needs to interact with experience.
• Supports role of interpretation bias in development and maintenance of affective disorders.
• Larger trials needed to establish therapeutic efficacy.