UNLABELLED Biases in attention processes are thought to play a crucial role in the aetiology and maintenance of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). The goal of the present study was to examine the efficacy of a programme intended to train attention towards positive cues and a programme intended to train attention towards negative cues. In a randomised, controlled, double-blind design, the impact of ...

People with social phobia report anticipatory and retrospective judgments about social situations that appear consistent with a negative interpretative bias. However, it is not at all clear that biased interpretative inferences are made "on-line;" that is, at the time that ambiguous information is first encountered. In a previous study, volunteers who were anxious about interviews were found to...

Recent developments in the study of animal cognition and emotion have resulted in the 'judgement bias' model of animal welfare. Judgement biases describe the way in which changes in affective state are characterized by changes in information processing. In humans, anxiety and depression are characterized by increased expectation of negative events and negative interpretation of ambiguous inform...

BACKGROUND Positive self-bias is thought to be protective for mental health. We previously found that the degree of positive bias when learning self-referential social evaluation decreases with increasing social anxiety. It is unclear whether this reduction is driven by differences in state or trait anxiety, as both are elevated in social anxiety; therefore, we examined the effects on the state...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES This two-year follow-up study evaluated the long-term outcomes of two early interventions that aimed at reducing social and test anxiety in young adolescents at risk for developing social anxiety disorder. METHODS In this RCT, moderately socially anxious adolescents (N=240, mean age 13.6 years) were randomly assigned to a 10-week internet-based multifaceted cognitive...

When anxious or depressed people try to recall emotionally ambiguous events, they produce errors that reflect their habits of interpreting ambiguity in negative ways. These distortions are revealed by experiments that evaluate performance on memory tasks after taking interpretation biases into account—an alternative to the standard memory-bias procedure that examines the accuracy of memory for ...

Attention bias modification (ABM) programs have been considered as a promising new approach for the treatment of various disorders, including social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, previous studies yielded ambiguous results regarding the efficacy of ABM in SAD. The present proof-of-concept study investigates the feasibility of a newly developed virtual reality (VR)-based dot-probe training par...

Over the past 20 years evidence has accumulated that individuals suffering from anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous information as threatening. Considering the causal role of this interpretive bias in anxiety, it was recently established that modifying interpretive biases influences anxiety. This suggests that anxiety can be clinically treated by directly targeting this interpretive bias. The p...

Background Depressed populations demonstrate a greater tendency to have negative interpretations on ambiguous situations. Cognitive theories concerning depression proposed that such a negative bias plays an important role in developing and maintaining depression. There is now fairly consistent evidence arising from different stimuli and assessment methods that depression is featured by such a b...