Induced emotional interpretation bias and anxiety.

“Mathews & Mackintosh (2000), for example, used ambiguous scenarios to train individuals to make either positive (nonanxious) or negative (anxious) interpretations of ambiguous text.”

“There is actually a growing literature, using a training paradigm, that suggests a causal relationship between interpretive biases and anxiety (MacLeod, Campbell, Rutherford, & Wilson, 2004 ; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000 ; Yiend & Mackintosh, 2004 ).”

“EMOTIONAL VULNERABILITY A second series of experiments (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000) extended these conclusions to the interpretation of texts describing realistic ambiguous social situations.”

“Finally, a new task, which was based on that used by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) to assess the interpretation of emotional ambiguity, was added to check whether the valenced experimental conditions resulted in a congruent interpretation bias for new material.”

“Mathews & Mackintosh (2000) found that participants who completed a single session of their CBM-I task in the interpret-positive training condition subsequently reported lower state anxiety levels than those who completed the task in the interpret-negative condition.”

“2).”

“The original CBM-I paradigm using verbal scripts by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) used imagery instructions—“imagine yourself in the situation.””

“Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) used ambiguous scenarios to train individuals to make either positive (nonanxious) or negative (anxious) interpretations of ambiguous text in a sample of anxious individuals.”

“One experiment trained interpretation biases with the procedures established by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) and found that recall of new ambiguous scenarios presented after training contained distortions that reflected the type of interpretations practiced during training (Tran, Hertel, &…”

“[76, 105] In the most common paradigm, Ambiguous Situations (AS),[104] participants read or hear a variety of social scenarios that are ambiguous (e.”

“Mathews and Mackintosh[63] used ambiguous scenarios to train individuals to make either positive (nonanxious) or negative (anxious) interpretations of ambiguous text in a sample of anxious individuals.”

“Whereas Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) induced positive versus negative interpretations, we induced interpretations consistent with high-level construals (DR mode) or with low-level construals (A-DR mode).”

“This procedure has proven successful in inducing the desired interpretation bias, which then generalizes to new ambiguous scenarios (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000) and persists across several days (Yiend, Mackintosh, & Mathews, 2005).”

“Mathews and Mackintosh ( 2000 ) used ambiguous scenarios to train individuals to make either positive (non-anxious) or negative (anxious) interpretations of ambiguous text.”

“Thus, for example, MacLeod, Rutherford, Campbell, Ebsworthy, and Holker (2002) employed undergraduate students with midrange levels of trait anxiety, whereas Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) and Grey and Mathews (2000) used community volunteers unselected for any symptoms of dysfunction.”

“In total, five included only one training condition and therefore had no random assignment to training group (see also table 1): Blackwell and Holmes [33] trained seven individuals to adopt benign interpretations, Grey and Mathews [5] administered neutral interpretation bias training to 20 individuals, Holmes and coll…”

“The paradigm emerged from the experimental literature on modification of negative interpretive biases (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000), and in its development for depression, there has been increasing emphasis on the mental imagery component (Holmes, Lang, & Deeprose, 2009).”

“…are repeatedly presented with ambiguous scenarios that are consistently resolved in a positive manner, thus training an automatic bias to positively interpret novel ambiguous information in their day-to-day lives (Holmes, Mathews, Dalgleish, & Mackintosh, 2006; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“Provided that interpretation biases have been shown to causally increase anxiety (Mathews and Mackintosh, 2000), Davey and colleagues argued that disgustmay cause anxiety through the induction of negative interpretation biases.”

“The materials and methods used here were originally developed to manipulate interpretive biases (Grey & Mathews, 2000; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“…Blier and de Montigny, 1999) that are characterized by enhanced anticipation of, and sensitivity to threat-related stimuli, punishment, and negative feedback (Beats et al , 1996; Elliott et al , 1997; Mathews and Mackintosh, 2000; Steffens et al , 2001; Richards et al , 2002; Murphy et al , 2003).”

“The paradigm targeted this interpretation bias via positive mental imagery and originated in the work by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000).”

“Ambiguous Stories In the second task, derived from procedures used by Mathews and his colleagues (Hirsch and Mathews 1997; Mathews and Mackintosh 2000), daughters were presented with short stories in which the emotional valence of the story remained ambiguous until the final word was presented, resolving the ambiguity.”

“Experimental methods known collectively as “cognitive bias modification” (CBM) procedures have been developed to selectively modify automatic biases in attention (CBMa: MacLeod, Rutherford, Campbell, Ebsworthy, & Holker, 2002) and interpretation of ambiguity (CBMi: Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“Perhaps the most predominant measure of interpretation bias in youth depression is the ambiguous scenarios (AS) task (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“For example, Mathews and colleagues (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000 ; Mathews & MacLeod, 2002 ) have described an experimental paradigm to demonstrate that interpretation bias can be learned by training.”

“…biases play a causal role in maintaining emotional disorders and that training sessions designed to modify these biases reduce stress reactivity and state anxiety in high-traitanxious participants (e.g., MacLeod, Rutherford, Campbell, Ebsworthy, & Holker, 2002; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“On the basis of Mathews and Mackintosh (2000), each scenario had the final word missing and was emotionally ambiguous up to this point (e.g., “As you are walking down a crowded street in Norwich, you see your new flatmate on the other side.”

“The notion that processing biases may be apparent for some stimuli (e.g., phylogenetically prepared stimuli) but not for others (e.g., general threat stimuli) is not novel and has been discussed in some recent cognitive theories of anxiety ( Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000 ).”

“Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) were also able to train both positive and threatening interpretation biases in a community population.”

“For example, in the scenario paradigm by Mathews and Mackintosh [69], patients are presented with a short scenario that is ambiguous until the final word, which is a fragmented word that disambiguates in a positive or negativemanner [62,67].”

“Furthermore, interpretation bias (e.g., Grey & Mathews, 2000; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000; see also overview in Mathews & MacLeod, 2002) may be a precedent or a consequence of biases in attention, expectancies, and memory.”

“In the study reported by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000), a distinction was made between training in which participants were required to actively generate, rather than be passively exposed to, the emotional meaning of ambiguous scripts.”

“While results from the Mathews et al. study (2007) are encouraging, several issues demand clarification.”

“Prior research has demonstrated that interpretation bias is one form of information processing that is malleable (Grey & Mathews, 2000; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“Training healthy individuals to attend to threat increases their anxiety levels (Mathews and Mackintosh, 2000; Mathews and MacLeod, 2005).”

“Materials and apparatus Materials were taken from the experiments reported by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000). Training items comprised three sentences of text, with the last item of the last sentence being a”

“A number of studies (e.g., Calvo, Eysenck, & Castillo, 1997; Hadwin, Frost, French, & Richards, 1997; MacLeod & Cohen, 1993; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000) have provided support to this postulation by showing that individuals with heightened trait anxiety tend to endorse a threatening interpretation of an ambiguous situa…”

“…have most often targeted attention bias, i.e., the tendency to selectively attend to threat-relevant information (CBM-A) (e.g., MacLeod et al., 2002), and interpretation bias, i.e., the tendency to interpret stimuli in a negative or threatening manner (CBM-I) (e.g., Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“…presented girls whose mothers had experienced at least one depressive episode during the child’s lifetime (high risk) and girls whose mothers had never had a psychological disorder (low risk) with a task modeled after a priming paradigm used in the anxiety literature (Mathews & Machintosh, 2000).”

“We combined some well established paradigms such as a word fragment task to modify interpretive bias [15] and a modified visual probe task to modify attentional bias [16] with less-often used paradigms, such as a conditioning paradigm to modify implicit social anxiety associations [17] and a classical conditioning tas…”

“More convincing evidence of a causal link between the two has been provided by recent studies in which interpretational biases were experimentally manipulated (Grey & Mathews, 2000; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000; Yiend, Mackintosh, & Mathews, 2005; Wilson, MacLeod, Mathews, & Rutherford, 2006).”

“Induced bias was assessed following CBM-App training using a two-phase procedure involving an initial encoding stage, followed by a later surprise recognition stage (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“Despite these findings, fundamental questions over cause and effect remain: do interpretation biases contribute to the development of anxiety and mood symptoms or are they merely mood-congruent effects on cognition? To address this question, Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) developed a cognitive bias modification (CBM) p…”

“We developed a measure for interpretation bias that included 10 social and 10 nonsocial items, on the basis of the measure used by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000). The procedure for presenting the measure is as follows: 1) presentation of ambiguous scenarios; 2) a 2-min filler task; 3) presentation of four interpretatio…”

“word in the event description (e.g. Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000 ).”

“Interpretation biases have been extensively studied in relation to psychopathology, where they are argued to have a role in the onset and maintenance of disorders such as anxiety and depression (e.g., Beck and Clarke, 1988; Mathews and Mackintosh, 2000; Clark, 2001; Hirsch and Mathews, 2012; Hirsch et al., 2016).”

“The initial version of the AST used recognition ratings and required a somewhat complex computation of a bias score (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000).”

“A modified version of the CBM paradigm used by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) was used in which participants learned to ascribe positive or negative interpretations to ambiguous scenarios related to AS.”

“…suggest that increasing an attention bias to threat and negative interpretive bias enhances an individual’s vulnerability to stress (Eldar, Ricon, & Bar-Haim, 2008; MacLeod, Rutherford, Campbell, Ebsworthy, & Holker, 2002; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000; Mathews, Ridgeway, Cook, & Yiend, 2007).”

“The paradigm has predominantly been used to experimentally modify interpretations of ambiguous situations (Holmes, Lang, & Shah, in press; Holmes, Mathews, Dalgleish, & Mackintosh, 2006; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000; Salemink, van den Hout, & Kindt, 2007).”

“Ten social and 10 nonsocial scenarios were created; some were adapted from Mathews and Mackintosh (2000), and others were developed by Faith Brozovich.”

“Although Mathews and MacLeod (2002) and Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) showed that such biases can in- crease anxiety in previously nonanxious individuals, it is worth speculating what factors might determine whether a bias such as the one induced in this study leads to anxiety.”

“Future ERP studies can begin to tease apart these issues by priming or “training” certain interpretations of ambiguous stimuli (Grey & Mathews, 2000; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000; Murphy et al., 2007), using imagery manipulations (e.g., Hirsch et al., 2003), and asking participants to rate the…”

“Though prior training studies have obtained effects of training for both positive and negative training groups (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000; Salemink et al., 2007; Yiend et al., 2005), some of our measures (i.e., response latencies) indicate that the positive training may have had stronger effects…”

“The current findings replicate past research demonstrating effects of CBM-I (e.g., Mackintosh et al., 2006; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000; Salemink, van den Hout, & Kindt, 2007; Yiend et al., 2005).”

“developed by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) with eight socially-anxious patients who had a diagnosis of psychosis.”