Performance-Based Interpretation Bias in Clinically Anxious Youths: Relationships With Attention, Anxiety, and Negative Cognition
Section snippets
Participants
The sample consisted of 26 clinically anxious youths ages 9 to 17 (M = 12.65, SD = 2.81) and 39% male. The majority of youths were Caucasian (58%), although a substantial proportion (42%) consisted of ethnic minorities, with 15% Hispanic, 8% Asian/Pacific Islander, and 19% of youths identifying with more than one racial/ethnic category. All youths met criteria for a primary DSM-IV-TR anxiety disorder, including generalized anxiety disorder (n = 14), social phobia (n = 11), and separation anxiety
Components of interpretation
The primary aim of this study was to probe the components of interpretation to examine whether percentage of interpretations endorsed and/or reaction time indices were useful indicators of interpretation bias. Pearson correlations across interpretation components and other variables under study were compared (see Table 1). Of all interpretation components, percentage of negative interpretations endorsed was most consistently associated with other variables, with significant positive
Discussion
Theoretical models of anxiety implicate the role of biases in basic cognitive processing as underlying mechanisms in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. While IP models have been widely tested and empirically supported in internalizing adults, the youth literature is at a far earlier stage of development. Only three investigations to date have assessed interpretation bias via performance-based means, and these studies have not examined specific components of interpretation
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
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The combined cognitive bias hypothesis in anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis
2022, Journal of Anxiety DisordersCitation Excerpt :Similar to studies of depression, the current body of anxiety research can address the questions raised by Everaert et al. (2012). For example, some findings have demonstrated significant associations between attention and memory biases (LeMoult & Joormann, 2012; Reid, Salmon, & Lovibond, 2006) as well as between attention and interpretation biases (Richards, French, Nash, Hadwin, & Donnelly, 2007; Rozenman, Amir, & Weersing, 2014). Likewise, there is emerging evidence addressing the causal link between biases where manipulation of attention bias resulted in a change to interpretation bias (Bowler et al., 2017; de Voogd, Wiers, & Salemink, 2017) and vice versa (Amir, Bomyea, & Beard, 2010; Mobini et al., 2014).
Like parent, like child: Is parent interpretation bias associated with their child's interpretation bias and anxiety? A systematic review and meta-analysis
2021, Journal of Affective DisordersCitation Excerpt :More recent conceptualizations of interpretation bias have focused on this cognitive process as fast, uncontrolled, and likely occurring automatically and without awareness (Amir et al., 2005; Rozenman et al., 2014). In the last decade, investigators have demonstrated that performance-based interpretation bias tasks in which individuals are required to respond to stimuli as quickly as bias is proposed to occur (e.g., ~3 seconds; Beard and Amir, 2008; Rozenman et al., 2017) capture a greater proportion of variance and therefore may be better indicators of interpretation bias than self-reports (e.g., Rozenman et al., 2014). However, every single study included in this meta-analysis utilized either self-reports or tasks that allowed for unlimited time to respond, increasing the possibility that the biases assessed involve higher-level processing (Lau et al., 2013; Rozenman et al., 2014; MacLeod & Mathews, 2012).
Brain and Behavior Correlates of Risk Taking in Pediatric Anxiety Disorders
2021, Biological PsychiatryA systematic review of the word sentence association paradigm (WSAP)
2019, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental PsychiatryExposure therapy for pediatric irritability: Theory and potential mechanisms
2019, Behaviour Research and TherapyThinking anxious, feeling anxious, or both? Cognitive bias moderates the relationship between anxiety disorder status and sympathetic arousal in youth
2017, Journal of Anxiety DisordersCitation Excerpt :A better understanding of potential relationships between these implicated processes would provide more direct cognitive and biological prevention and treatment targets. Anxious youth have also been shown to demonstrate an attention bias, or selectively attend to threat (e.g., Bar-Haim, Lamy, & Pergamin, 2007) and an interpretation bias, or interpret threat from ambiguous information (e.g., Cannon & Weems, 2010; Rozenman, Amir, & Weersing, 2014), using performance-based tasks. The attention bias literature in youth is mixed, suggesting that selective attention to threat may be quite heterogeneous and not necessarily a ubiquitous phenomenon in youth (e.g., Bar-Haim, Kerem, Lamy, & Zakay, 2010; Eldar, Apter, Lotan, & Edgar, 2012; Waters, Bradley, & Mogg, 2014).