W4 T1 P2

• A theory by Williams and colleagues focused on the impact of anxiety and depression on processing emotions.
• The theory differentiates between priming (automatic activation of long-term memory components by a stimulus) and elaboration (strategic activation of related concepts).
• Williams and colleagues made predictions regarding how anxiety and depression affect explicit and implicit memory.
• Explicit memory involves conscious recollection and elaborative processes, while implicit memory relies on priming and automatic processes.
• Those with depression exhibit an explicit memory bias, favoring the retrieval of threatening material.
• Anxious individuals demonstrate an implicit memory bias toward threatening material.

Attentional Bias Model

• Williams and colleagues propose two pre-attentive processing stages in their attentional bias model.
• The first stage involves an affective decision mechanism that computes the threat value or negativity of a stimulus.
• High levels of current state anxiety increase the resulting threat value output.
• If the threat value is high enough, a secondary resource allocation mechanism is triggered, influenced by trait anxiety differences.
• Higher threat anxiety directs attentional resources toward the stimulus.
• Lower threat levels direct attention away from the threatening event.
• Depressed individuals elaborate on threat-related stimuli, leading to a memory bias that favors the retrieval of threatening material over neutral material.

Functional Differences

• The strength of Williams and colleagues' approach lies in its analysis of the functional differences between anxiety and depression.
• Cognitive biases differ between anxiety and depression.
• Anxiety relates to anticipating danger and prioritizes processing threatening stimuli.
• Depression involves replacing failed goals, making the conceptual processing of internally generated material related to failure or loss more relevant.
• Beck and Bower predicted a global cognitive bias that applies to all emotional states, in contrast to this view.

Ambiguous Emotional Events

• Mathews and Mackintosh suggest that both positive and negative meanings of ambiguous emotional events may be initially active.
• Competitive processes in attention lead to one meaning inhibiting the other rapidly.
• Most people have an in-built bias that favors positive evaluative input, leading to an advantage for positive interpretation.
• Anxious individuals are more likely to find a match for the threatening representation.

Threat Evaluation System

• The threat evaluation system is enhanced by current anxious moods.
• As anxiety increases, the advantage of positive interpretations decreases until threatening meaning becomes dominant.
• People can exert some control over this process by intentionally attending to positive meanings.
• Studies address whether interpretation can be manipulated and assess whether learning a positive bias benefits individuals with anxiety and depression.
• Interpretation bias training was pioneered by Matthews and Mackintosh.
• Training uses assessment paradigms to train participants, utilizing repeated practice to resolve ambiguous material consistently (usually benign).

Training

• Training involves repeated exposure to ambiguous stories that force disambiguation using word completion.
• An example story: "Your partner asks you to go to an anniversary dinner that their company is holding. You have not met any of their work colleagues before. Getting ready to go, you think that the new people you meet will find you...".
• The story could be completed positively (friendly) or negatively (boring).
• The final question reinforces the desired interpretation.

Cognitive Bias Modification

• Cognitive bias modification training significantly impacts interpretation bias.
• Promoting a benign interpretation bias reduces symptoms such as anxiety, worry, domination, and intrusive memories.
• Training high worriers to preferentially access benign meanings of emotionally ambiguous scenarios reduces worry persistence.
• Mathews and Mackintosh demonstrated that facilitating a benign interpretation bias reduces trait anxiety in high trait-anxious people.
• Interpretation biases are modified in traditional psychotherapy forms, such as cognitive behavioral interventions.

Social Anxiety Disorder

• Participants with social anxiety disorder who received CBT had significantly lower negative interpretation bias scores compared to untreated participants.
• Reductions in catastrophic misinterpretations after CBT predicted subsequent reductions in symptom severity in people with panic disorder.
• Interpretation bias plays a causal role in maintaining emotional disorders' key components, such as anxiety and depression.
• Cognitive biases should be targeted using specific therapeutic interventions in clinical and non-clinical populations as a prevention strategy.

Williams' Attentional Bias Model explains how anxiety and depression impact emotion processing. The model distinguishes between priming and elaboration in memory. It suggests those with depression have an explicit memory bias for threatening content, while anxious individuals show an implicit memory bias.