Interpretation of ambiguous information in clinical depression

A “How-To” Guide for Designing Judgment Bias Studies to Assess Captive Animal Welfare

“…People who are anxious or depressed, on the other hand, make more negative judgements about ambiguous information, recall more negative information, expect more negative events to occur in the future, and attend more readily to negative information (Bradley, Mogg, Millar, & White, 1995;MacLeod & Byrne, 1996;Mogg, Bradbury, & Bradley 2006;Richards et al, 2002;Richards, Holmes, Pell, & Bethell, 2013). Bad feelings can have adaptive emotional underpinnings in a threatening environment: increased arousal in anxiety speeds responses to threat (Mogg, Bradley, & Williams, 1995); social withdrawal in depression conserves energy and may keep you away from harm (Nettle & Bateson, 2011).…”

Neurocircuitry of Mood Disorders

“…Thus, currently depressed patients show enhanced recall for negatively vs positively valenced information on memory tests (Bradley et al, 1995;Murray et al, 1999), greater interference from depressionrelated negative words vs happy or neutral words on emotional stroop tasks (Broomfield et al, 2007;GallardoPerez et al, 1999), faster responses to sad vs happy words on affective attention shifting tasks (Murphy et al, 1999;Erickson et al, 2005), and preferential attentiveness to faces with sad vs neutral expressions on a face dot-probe task (Gotlib et al, 2004a, b). Depressed patients also are more negative in their interpretation of ambiguous words (Mogg et al, 2006) and ambiguous situations (Nunn et al, 1997) than controls. These findings suggest that a bias in stimulus processing exists in depression that may produce a preferential representation of negatively toned information.…”

Interpretation bias characterizes trait rumination

“…Interpretations are thought to maintain negative emotional states by strengthening negative self-beliefs and reinforcing negative memory biases (e.g., Hertel et al, 2008). Interestingly, several recent studies have failed to find evidence for interpretive biases in depression (e.g., Bisson & Sears, 2007;Lawson & MacLeod, 1999;Mogg, Bradbury, & Bradley, 2006). Indeed, self-referential processing may be necessary for these biases to emerge (e.g., Hindash & Amir, 2012;Wisco & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2010), and ruminative thinking may thereby provide the link between depression and the tendency to infuse ambiguous stimuli with negative meaning.…”