W4 T1 P1

Cognition Definition

• Cognition comes from the Latin word “to know”
• Cognition helps people process data via perception, knowledge from life experience, and subjective traits
• It integrates all data to assess experiences
• Cognition helps assimilate and process data from perception, experience, and beliefs, to convert them into knowledge

Cognitive Processes

• Cognition includes different cognitive processes like attention, memory, interpretation, and reasoning
• Cognitive processes incorporate new knowledge and make decisions with it
• Attention and memory are associated with anxiety and depression

Attention

• Attention lets people focus on stimuli to process it thoroughly
• It is a fundamental cognitive function for the development of daily situations, and is used in a majority of tasks
• Attention controls and regulates cognitive processes from perception to learning and reasoning

Memory

• Memory lets people code, store, and recover information from the past
• It is a basic process for learning and forming a sense of identity
• Short-term memory retains information briefly like remembering a phone number to write down
• Long-term memory is broken into declarative and procedural memory
• Declarative memory acquires language and education, like knowing the Second World War ended in 1945
• Procedural memory learns through routines, like how to ride a bike
• Normal cognitive processes, like attention and memory, can be distorted

Cognitive Bias

• Cognitive bias is the tendency to consistently favor stimulus material of a particular content
• Up to 175 different cognitive biases have been identified
• They usually relate to enduring personality characteristic or a state
• Those who are more hungry show greater attention to food-related words or attentional bias
• Attentional bias for drug-related cues has been associated with drug maintenance and relapse
• Depressed patients are more likely to notice things that are consistent with their depressed mood

Vulnerabilities

• Biological and social risk factors cause certain people to develop anxiety and depression
• Genetic components are factors in anxiety and depression
• Generalised anxiety disorder is more prevalent in relatives of patients with such a disorder
• There is more evidence for genetic vulnerabilities in depression
• Social risk factors include coming from a lower socioeconomic background
• Being a woman is associated with a higher prevalence of depression
• Childhood adversity or life events can trigger depression
• Social networks and support are considered resilient factors
• Personality traits, like neuroticism, are linked to all anxiety disorders, and can cause irritability
• Cognitive biases are a possible contributing

Vulnerability Threshold Model

• Members of a population have a normal distribution of genetic liability for a particular trait
• Liability for a disease is the sum of many small independent effects
• Individuals whose genetic liabilities exceed the threshold value are affected by the trait
• Individuals with liability less than this threshold will never manifest disease
• Exposure to environmental factors can shift the disease liability of an individual with genetic vulnerabilities towards or away from the threshold value
• Individuals might move in and out of levels of vulnerability, a process that is not necessarily fixed lifetime thing

Cognitive Bias as Vulnerability Factor

• Cognitive biases might be considered, according to this model, as a vulnerability factor
• Vulnerability to anxiety is associated with different processing styles that are elicited by stressful events
• In vulnerable individuals, a stressful event such as an upcoming examination or a medical diagnosis elicits a vigilant processing mode in which attention is readily captured by threatening cues
• Those individuals will, in effect, be exposed to a stream of information about possible dangers, leading to increased anxiety
• In less vulnerable people, the same event may be insufficient to trigger a shift from the default avoidant mood in which threatening information is ignored
• It is the type of processing style, or bias, that is elicited by events which causes vulnerability to anxiety, instead of bias to processing being only an incidental product of emotional variations

Anxiety and Depression

• Anxiety and depression are the most common mental problems worldwide
• They show rather different cognitive features
• Attentional phenomena have been much more prominent in anxiety, and memory phenomena more prominent with depression
• A characteristic of depression is predominance of recall of negative aspects of the past
• Biographical memory is the aspect of memory that is concerned with the recollection of personal experience to past events
• It is central to human functioning, contributing to an individual's sense of self, to his or her ability to remain oriented in the world, and to pursue goals effectively in the light of fast problem solving

Lloyd and Lishman Study

• Used a list of neutral words as stimuli to cue memories in clinically depressed patients
• Patients were instructed to think of either a pleasant or unpleasant memory, and to signal to the experimenter when a suitable memory came to mind
• The more severe the depression, the quicker the patient retrieved an unpleasant memory

Williams and Broadbent findings

• Suicidal patients were slower to respond to positive cues than controls
• Suicidal patients, in many of their responses to both positive and negative cue words, failed to provide a specific memory
• Autobiographical memories of suicidal patients might differ in form as well as in content or speed of retrieval
• Depressed were faster than controls to report negative than positive memories
• The first problem is that depressed may have had more depressive experiences
• The second problem is that they may simply evaluate neutral or ambiguous experiences negatively

Teasdale study

• Both problems were subsequently taken into account in two separate research strategies by John Teasdale et al in Oxford
• The first strategy was to examine clinically depressed individuals selected for the presence of diurnal variation in moods
• Patients who were given words as cues and asked to respond with the first personal memory that came to their mind
• Happy memories were less probable and more sad memories were more probable when the patients were more depressed, and vice versa
• The second strategy used mood induction in normal subjects
• Subjects were randomly allocated to elated or depressed condition, and told to recall positive or negative autobiographical memories in response to neutral words
• Induced depressed moods led to slower recall of positive rather than negative memories

Similar Biases

• Similar biases have been found in anxiety, but are more normally associated with attention
• Stroop Task is the earliest, most robust, reliable finding
• Stroop Task investigates interference effects of emotional material on cognitive processing
• In the Stroop Task, subjects have to name the ink colour of word stimuli as fast and accurately as possible, while at the same time ignoring the word meaning
• Anxious patients only were slowed in colour naming threat words matching their primary concerns
• Spider phobics showed disruption in colour naming relevant words
• Response bias means that the bias is at output stage and not the tension level
• These biases might not be well-understood, and anxious patients, for example, are more preoccupied by these words, so take longer time to suppress

Attentional Dot-Probe Task

• Participants are asked to stare at a fixation cross on the centre of the computer screen
• Two stimuli, one of which is neutral and one or which is threatening, appear randomly on either side of the screen
• Stimuli are presented for a pre-determined length of time before a dot is presented in the location of one form or stimulus
• Participants are instructed to indicate the location of this dot as quickly as possible, either via keyboard or response box
• Quicker reaction time to the dot when it occurs in the previous location of a threatening stimulus is often interpreted as a vigilance to threat
• Anxiety states are associated with increased attention to threat cues, and a greater likelihood of receiving the threatening meaning of ambiguous events
• When a task involves ignoring threatening cues, anxiety leads to a slowing of performance
• When attention to threat helps to locate a target, then performance is speeded
• Anxious individuals have their attention captured automatically by threat-related cues and meanings

Recent Studies

• Anxious subjects tend to interpret ambiguous words in a more negative way than do non-anxious control subjects
• Eysenck and colleagues asked the anxious patients and unaffected controls to listen to sentences that could lead to negative or neutral interpretations
• Control subjects rated the more neutral versions as being more similar in meaning to the original version that they had heard previously, but anxious patients said both were equally similar to the original

Interpretation Made Online

• Researchers record the reading times for threatening or neutral continuation of ambiguous sentences to determine if the former results could be attributed toward interpretations made online
• Anxious subjects read threat-consistent continuations faster, implying that they had already imposed a mood-congruent interpretation on the original sentence
• The selection of the more threatening meaning of ambiguous events is a characteristic of individuals who are prone to anxiety
• It has further been argued that this bias may be a factor in causing or maintaining their anxious mood

Theoretical Rationale

• Beck sees affective disorders as characterised by schema
• Schemas are cognitive structures which influence a person's perceptions, interpretations, and memories
• Experiences are perceived in relation to a person's schema, and are likely to be distorted so as to be consistent with them
• In depression, the prominent schemas are to do with negative views of the self, the world, and the future
• In anxiety, the key schemata are about vulnerability and danger

Beck's Schema Theory

• Beck's Schema Theory is clinical in origin
• It represents the core of cognitive behavioural therapy
• Schemas are in fact complex sets of underlying stable attitudes and assumptions
• Schemas originate from very early experiences and are stored in the long-term memory
• Schemas help to organise incoming information using top-down processes
• Schemas consist of beliefs about the self, the world, and others
• Several schemas may be more or less active, but we are not necessarily aware of them
• According to Beck's theory, we process the bias in line with the schemas at all stages

Bower's Network Theory

• Bower developed a human associative memory network theory, and applied it to emotions
• According to this model, events are represented in memory as configurations made up of associative connections, for example, called pathways, between the various concept or nodes needed to describe the event
• Emotions, concepts, and events are nodes i the network
• Nodes are activated internally or externally
• Activation spreads from emotion node to previously associated material, and as mood-congruent material is more easily accessed
• Activation above some threshold relates to conscious awareness
• Two things can vary: the strength of the links and the activation threshold of the nodes
• Depressed individuals retrieve more negative items because their mood makes congruent material more accessible

Summary

• All disorders show biases, and all cognitive processes are biased
• Anxious patients typically show biases only in attention but not memory
• Depressed patients typically show biases in memory, but not in attention

This lesson covers the vulnerability threshold model, environmental factors affecting disease liability, and the cognitive features of anxiety and depression. It also details the role of attention and highlights the function of memory.