Interpretation of ambiguous information in clinical depression

The present study used two cognitive tasks—a text comprehension task and a homophone task—to investigate whether clinically depressed individuals have a negative bias when interpreting ambiguous information. Previous research indicates that both tasks are sensitive to anxiety-related interpretive bi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behaviour research and therapy 2006-10, Vol.44 (10), p.1411-1419
Main Authors: Mogg, Karin, Bradbury, Katherine E., Bradley, Brendan P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Ambiguous stimulus
Anxiety
Bias
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Comprehension
Depression
Depressive Disorder - psychology
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Female
Humans
Interpretation
Interpretation of ambiguity
Male
Medical sciences
Mental depression
Mental Recall
Middle Aged
Mood disorders
Negative bias
Negative ideation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychometrics
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Semantics
Studies
Task performance
Text comprehension
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Summary:The present study used two cognitive tasks—a text comprehension task and a homophone task—to investigate whether clinically depressed individuals have a negative bias when interpreting ambiguous information. Previous research indicates that both tasks are sensitive to anxiety-related interpretive biases, and that the former is less prone to response bias effects. Negative memory biases were also assessed. Results showed that, compared with normal controls, depressed individuals made more negative interpretations on the homophone task, and they also showed an enhanced negative recall bias. However, the groups did not differ in interpretative bias on the text comprehension task. Possible explanations of the results are discussed, including the potential influences of self-referent processing and response bias.
ISSN:0005-7967
1873-622X
DOI:10.1016/j.brat.2005.10.008