Interpretive biases for ambiguous stimuli in social anxiety

Constans, Joseph I.; Penn, David L.; Ihen, Gail H.; Hope, Debra A.

doi:10.1016/s0005-7967(98)00180-6

Cited by 153 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…In contrast to the literature on interpretive biases, however, most studies have not found evidence of memory bias either in highly anxious participants (e.g., Brendle & Wenzel, 2004;Constans et al, 1999;Sanz, 1996;Wenzel et al, 2005) or in clinical samples (e.g., Amir, Coles, Brigidi, & Foa, 2001;Becker, Roth, Andrich, & Margraf, 1999;Cloitre, Cancienne, Heimberg, Holt, & Liebowitz, 1995;Rapee, McCallum, Melville, Ravenscroft, & Rodney, 1994;Rinck & Becker, 2005). Two exceptions to this pattern were obtained in investigations of implicit memory, in which deliberate focus on the past was not involved (Amir, Foa, & Coles, 2000;Lundh & Ost, 1997).…”

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confidence: 76%

Biases in interpretation and memory in generalized social phobia.

Hertel

Brozovich

Joormann

et al. 2008

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

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Two experiments examined the link between interpretation and memory in individuals diagnosed with Generalized Social Phobia (GSP). In Experiment 1, GSP and control participants generated continuations for nonsocial and ambiguous social scenarios. GSP participants produced more socially anxious and negative continuations for the social scenarios than did the controls. On the subsequent test of recalling the social scenarios, intrusion errors that shared meaning with the original continuations were made more frequently by the GSP group, producing false recall with emotionally negative features. To examine whether nonanxious individuals would also produce such errors if given emotional interpretations, in Experiment 2 the authors asked university students to read the scenarios plus endings produced by GSP participants in Experiment 1. The students either constructed vivid mental images of themselves as the main characters or thought about whether the endings provided closure. Low-anxious students in the closure condition produced fewer ending-based intrusions in recalling the social scenarios than did students in the other 3 conditions. Results illustrate the importance of examining the nature of sourcemonitoring errors in investigations of memory biases in social anxiety.

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confidence: 76%

Biases in interpretation and memory in generalized social phobia.

Hertel

Brozovich

Joormann

et al. 2008

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

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“…Most studies have found that socially anxious individuals favor threat interpretations compared to non-anxious controls (e.g., Amir, Foa, & Coles, 1998;Huppert, Foa, Furr, Filip, & Mathews, 2003;Roth, Antony, & Swinson, 2001;Stopa & Clark, 2000;Voncken, Bogels, & Vries, 2003). Additionally, some studies have found that socially anxious individuals also lack a benign interpretation bias exhibited by non-anxious individuals (Constans, Penn, Ihen, & Hope, 1999;Hirsch & Mathews, 1997. Together, these studies suggest that socially anxious individuals make fewer benign interpretations and more threat interpretations than nonanxious individuals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

A multi-session interpretation modification program: Changes in interpretation and social anxiety symptoms

Beard

Amir

2008

Behaviour Research and Therapy

263

257

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Previous research suggests that socially anxious individuals interpret ambiguous social information in a more threatening manner compared to non-anxious individuals. Recently, studies have experimentally modified interpretation and shown that this subsequently affected anxiety in non-anxious individuals. If similar procedures can modify interpretation biases in socially anxious individuals, they may lead to a reduction in social anxiety symptoms. In the current study, we examined the effect of a computerized Interpretation Modification Program (IMP) on interpretation bias and social anxiety symptoms. Twenty-seven socially anxious individuals were randomly assigned to the IMP or a control condition. Participants completed eight computer sessions over four weeks. The IMP modified interpretation by providing positive feedback when participants made benign interpretations and negative feedback in response to threat interpretations. The IMP successfully decreased threat interpretations, increased benign interpretations, and decreased social anxiety symptoms compared to the control condition. Moreover, changes in benign interpretation mediated IMP's effect on social anxiety. This initial trial suggests that interpretation modification may have clinical utility when applied as a multisession intervention.

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“…Ambiguity, which is brought about by missing or incomplete knowledge of relevant information (Camerer, 1995), is an important phenomenon that people deal with in everyday life, and has proven to be important in many fields such as clinical psychology (Constans, Penn, Ihen, & Hope, 1999), education (Price, Handley, Millar, & O'Donovan, 2010), public policies (Morone & Ozdemir, 2012), and management science (Ho, Keller, & Keltyka, 2002). In the field of decision‐making, ambiguity is a type of uncertainty that may emerge in the context of uninformative cues, options, or outcome feedback.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Valence and magnitude ambiguity in feedback processing

Xue

Broster

et al. 2017

Brain and Behavior

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BackgroundOutcome feedback which indicates behavioral consequences are crucial for reinforcement learning and environmental adaptation. Nevertheless, outcome information in daily life is often totally or partially ambiguous. Studying how people interpret this kind of information would provide important knowledge about the human evaluative system.MethodsThis study concentrates on the neural processing of partially ambiguous feedback, that is, either its valence or magnitude is unknown to participants. To address this topic, we sequentially presented valence and magnitude information; electroencephalography (EEG) response to each kind of presentation was recorded and analyzed. The event‐related potential components feedback‐related negativity (FRN) and P3 were used as indices of neural activity.ResultsConsistent with previous literature, the FRN elicited by ambiguous valence was not significantly different from that elicited by negative valence. On the other hand, the FRN elicited by ambiguous magnitude was larger than both the large and small magnitude, indicating the motivation to seek unambiguous magnitude information. The P3 elicited by ambiguous valence and ambiguous magnitude was not significantly different from that elicited by negative valence and small magnitude, respectively, indicating the emotional significance of feedback ambiguity. Finally, the aforementioned effects also manifested in the stage of information integration.ConclusionThese findings indicate both similarities and discrepancies between the processing of valence ambiguity and that of magnitude ambiguity, which may help understand the mechanisms of ambiguous information processing.

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Interpretive biases for ambiguous stimuli in social anxiety

Cited by 153 publications

References 13 publications

Biases in interpretation and memory in generalized social phobia.

Biases in interpretation and memory in generalized social phobia.

A multi-session interpretation modification program: Changes in interpretation and social anxiety symptoms

Valence and magnitude ambiguity in feedback processing

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