Abstract:Background
Theories suggest that interpretation biases play a role in the aetiology of a range of psychopathology including depression, anxiety and psychosis. We evaluate the psychometric properties of an adapted version of an ambiguous scenario task (i.e., Interpretation Bias Task [IBT]) that assesses benign and negative interpretations in four domains: immediate bodily injury; long-term illness; social rejection; and, performance failure.
Methods
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“…We adopted an Interpretation Bias Task (IBT) (Chan, Takano, Lau, & Barry, 2020; Heathcote et al., 2016) to examine participants’ interpretations for ambiguous situations. The IBT includes four domains of ambiguous situations describing immediate bodily injury, long‐term illness, social rejection and performance failure.…”
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
“…We adopted an Interpretation Bias Task (IBT) (Chan, Takano, Lau, & Barry, 2020; Heathcote et al., 2016) to examine participants’ interpretations for ambiguous situations. The IBT includes four domains of ambiguous situations describing immediate bodily injury, long‐term illness, social rejection and performance failure.…”
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
“…The Interpretation Bias task (IBT; Chan, Takano, et al, 2020), that is, the Chinese adaptation of the Adolescent Interpretations of Bodily Threat task (AIBT; Heathcote et al, 2016), was used to capture interpretation biases. Its full version consists of 23 personally relevant vignettes, referring to four domains (i.e., immediate bodily injury, long-term illness, social rejection, performance failure).…”
Within the coronavirus-disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, disease-related information is omnipresent in the media, whereas information about how to manage the pandemic is less often covered. Under the context where threat is present, this study investigated whether and how the strength of efficacy framing (i.e., the perspective adopted by a communicating text that emphasizes one's possibilities to cope with an external threat) of COVID-19-related news, as well as its interaction with trait health anxiety under the COVID-19 context, related to people's COVID-19-related cognitive outcomes. One hundred and ninety-three participants reported demographics, trait health anxiety, and COVID-19-related behaviors (e.g., precautionary measures, information-seeking behaviors). They then either read high-efficacy (n = 112; e.g., cure rate) or low-efficacy (n = 81; e.g., mortality rate) information about COVID-19. Afterward, their tendency to interpret illness-and COVID-19-related information more negatively, and other COVID-19-related cognitions (e.g., risk perception, behavioral change intentions) were assessed. High-efficacy framing resulted in lower-risk perception and marginally weaker COVID-19-related interpretation bias, compared with low-efficacy framing. There was some evidence of an interaction with health anxiety such that high-efficacy framing, compared with low-efficacy framing, was associated with greater intention to adopt protective behaviors, particularly for individuals with higher levels of health anxiety. Media framing of COVID-19 information affects how people respond to the pandemic; a high-efficacy communication style might more effectively encourage healthy behaviors than a low-efficacy narrative, particularly for people who are already anxious about their health.
“…To assess participants’ interpretation biases, an interpretation bias task (IBT) was adopted (Chan et al, 2020; Heathcote et al, 2016). The IBT consists of ambiguous scenarios in four domains related to immediate bodily injury, long‐term illness, social rejection and performance failure.…”
Background
Studies examining the effect of biased cognitions on later pain outcomes have primarily focused on attentional biases, leaving the role of interpretation biases largely unexplored. Also, few studies have examined pain‐related cognitive biases in elderly persons. The current study aims to fill these research gaps.
Methods
Younger and older adults with and without chronic pain (N = 126) completed an interpretation bias task and a free‐viewing task of injury and neutral scenes at baseline. Participants’ pain intensity and disability were assessed at baseline and at a 6‐month follow‐up. A machine‐learning data‐driven approach to analysing eye movement data was adopted.
Results
Eye movement analyses revealed two common attentional pattern subgroups for scene‐viewing: an “explorative” group and a “focused” group. At baseline, participants with chronic pain endorsed more injury‐/illness‐related interpretations compared to pain‐free controls, but they did not differ in eye movements on scene images. Older adults interpreted illness‐related scenarios more negatively compared to younger adults, but there was also no difference in eye movements between age groups. Moreover, negative interpretation biases were associated with baseline but not follow‐up pain disability, whereas a focused gaze tendency for injury scenes was associated with follow‐up but not baseline pain disability. Additionally, there was an indirect effect of interpretation biases on pain disability 6 months later through attentional bias for pain‐related images.
Conclusions
The present study provided evidence for pain status and age group differences in injury‐/illness‐related interpretation biases. Results also revealed distinct roles of interpretation and attentional biases in pain chronicity.
Significance
Adults with chronic pain endorsed more injury‐/illness‐related interpretations than pain‐free controls. Older adults endorsed more illness interpretations than younger adults. A more negative interpretation bias indirectly predicted pain disability 6 months later through hypervigilance towards pain.
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