Week 5 - Cognitive Biases and Self-Perception Flashcards
What do we mean by cogntitive biases?
Systematic errors in thinking; they affect everyone
Cognition (information processing): Attention, Perception, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval, Interpretation
Why care about cognitive biases?
- Patterns of attending and thinking in anxiety and depression
- Cognitive biases in attention, interpretation, memory,
- Understanding the basic cognitive processes informs theory
- Treatment development
What is Attentional Bias?
Systematic attentional selection of negative over competing neutral stimuli
What is Interpretive Bias?
Tendency to interpret ambiguous information as negative
What is Memory Bias?
enhanced memory performance for negative than neural information
- Implicit: relatively automatic, does not involve conscious recollection
- Explicit: effortful, conscious, recollection of events
How can we measure attentional bias?
Eye-tracking can give more information on the time-course of attentional bias
Attentional bias in anxiety
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
What about in depression?
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
Evidence of attention bias to threat in anxiety (Bar-Haim, 2007; Pergamin-Hight, 2015)
- 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),
More theory
Dual-Process Models
**Amygdala: **
- Fast
- Automatic
- Associative
- Stimulus-Driven
- Unconscious
Prefrontal Cortext:
- Slow
- Effortful
- Reflective
- Strategic
- Regulatory
- Conscious
Underlying brain processes
Brain areas show greater activation during bottom-up (red) or top-down (blue) emotional experience
INTERPRATIVE bias in anxiety
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
Is there evidence of interpretive bias in social anxiety?
- 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
Why care about biases? Have seen that biases are associated with anxiety and depression; but do they have a causal role?
- 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.
Effects of modifying attentional bias on anxiety:
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.
Effects of modifying interpretative bias:
anxiety and depression
- 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.