Abstract:
Interpretation biases in the processing of ambiguous affective information are assumed to play an important role in the onset and maintenance of emotional disorders. Reports of low reliability for experimental measures of cognitive biases have called into question previous findings on the association of these measures with markers of mental health and demonstrated the need to systematically evaluate measurement reliability for measures of cognitive biases. We evaluated reliability and correlations with self-report measures of mental health for interpretation bias scores derived from the Ambiguous Cue Task (ACT), an experimental paradigm for the assessment of approach-avoidance behavior towards ambiguous affective stimuli. For a non-clinical sample, the measurement of an interpretation bias with the ACT showed high internal consistency (rSB = .91 - .96, N = 354) and acceptable 2-week test-retest correlations (rPearson = .61 - .65, n = 109). Correlations between the ACT interpretation bias scores and mental health-related self-report measures of personality and well-being were generally small (r ≤ |.11|) and statistically not significant when correcting for multiple comparisons. These findings suggest that in non-clinical populations, individual differences in the interpretation of ambiguous affective information as assessed with the ACT do not show a clear association with self-report markers of mental health. However, in allowing for a highly reliable measurement of interpretation bias, the ACT provides a valuable tool for studies considering potentially small effect sizes in non-clinical populations by studying bigger samples as well as for work on clinical populations, for which potentially greater effects can be expected.
摘要:
人们认为,在处理模棱两可的情感信息时,解释偏见在情绪障碍的发生和维持中起着重要作用。关于认知偏差实验措施可靠性低的报告对先前关于这些措施与心理健康标志物的关联的发现提出了质疑,并证明有必要系统地评估认知偏差措施的测量可靠性。我们评估了来自模糊线索任务(ACT)的解释偏差分数的可靠性和与心理健康自我报告指标的相关性,一种用于评估对模棱两可的情感刺激的回避行为的实验范式。对于非临床样本,使用ACT对解释偏差的测量显示出高度的内部一致性(rSB=.91-.96,N=354)和可接受的2周测试-重测相关性(rPearson=.61-.65,n=109).ACT解释偏见得分与心理健康相关的人格和幸福感自我报告指标之间的相关性通常较小(r≤|.11|),并且在校正多重比较时没有统计学意义。这些发现表明,在非临床人群中,使用ACT评估的模糊情感信息在解释方面的个体差异未显示出与心理健康自我报告标志物的明显关联.然而,在允许高度可靠地测量解释偏差方面,ACT为通过研究更大的样本以及临床人群的工作考虑非临床人群中潜在的小效应大小的研究提供了有价值的工具。可能会有更大的影响。