Cognitive Bias for Human Information Processingin Anxiety and Depression

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Anxiety and depression, which has been as emotional disorders, has been discussed as distortions of cognitive information processing from cognitive psychological approach. Distortions observed in various processing stages were generally called the cognitive bias, which was investigated by perspectives on attention, memory, and interpretation. Though the degrees of the cognitive biases were pointed out to determine by personal traits and emotional states, previous studies could not control these factors carefully. Therefore, the present report controlled personal traits and emotional states, that is, we used personality tests for anxiety and depression to select subjects and the mood induction procedure to elicit specific emotion. We examined five experiments concerning below four themes.(1) Attentional bias in anxiety and maintenance of negative mood : High trait anxiety subjects showed attentional bias to threatening words and maintained negative mood. Input of negative information by attentional bias might facilitate negative mood.(2) Relationship between attentional bias and memory bias : Attentional bias was observed in negative mood for high and low trait anxiety subjects, while implicit memory bias was shown by thigh trait anxiety ones. The difference between trait anxiety on cognitive biases might be explained by partial distributions of processing resources.(3) Relationship between attentional bias and coping style under controlled process : Under conscious and controlled process in anxiety, sensitizer who had approach-type coping showed vigilant bias to threatening words, while represser who had avoidant-like coping did avoidant bias to threatening words.(4) Interpretation bias in depression : Depressogenic schemata activated negative interpretations about ambiguous pictures.