Level 4 Emotion Option' Louise Phillips' Emotion and Cognition'

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Level 4 Emotion Option.Louise Phillips.Emotion
and Cognition.

• Lecture 3
• Cognitive theories of emotional dysfunction.
• Anxiety disorders and cognition.

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Cognitive theories of emotion dysfunction.
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Early cognitive theories of emotional disorders

• Beck memory schemas
• dysfunctional schema of self
• cognitive biases in information processing
• anxiety - thoughts of danger
• depression - thoughts of loss/failure
• Bower network model of affective processes.
• When experiencing emotion,
• primed to mood-congruent stimuli.

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Effects of anxiety on cognitive performance
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Distressing intrusive thoughts

• Beck anxiety and depression
• negative automatic thoughts
• Intrusive thoughts
• repetitive thoughts - unwanted uncomfortable
• interrupt ongoing activity
• difficult to control
• Eysenck intrusive thoughts in anxiety disorders
  impair working memory capacity.

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Anxiety and cognitive capacity

• Eysenck
• Poorer working memory (WM) capacity in anxiety
• Worry
• Resource-consuming
• Task-irrelevant
• Depletes WM capacity
• Anxious individuals
• Poorer on WM-demanding tasks
• More susceptible to memory interference

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Williams et al information processing models of
attentional bias

• anxiety effects are preconscious
• anxiety should influence preattentive processes
• depression influences processing only after
  stimulus identification
• depression should influence explicit memory,
  conscious processing

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Attention and preconscious processing
Conscious processing
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Methods of studying attention bias in mood
disorders

• Emotional Stroop
• compare time to name colour of neutral versus
  emotionally salient words
• e.g. CARPET versus CANCER
• Dot probe tasks
• compare time to respond to presence of dot in
  neutral versus emotionally salient stimuli

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Dot probe task
?

CANCER CARPET
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Left or right?
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Anxiety disorders and attentional processing.
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Anxiety

• Individual differences
• Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
• hypervigilance for threat stimuli
• distractibility
• Specific phobias
• preattentive analysis of biologically-prepotent
  aversive stimuli
• automatically shifts attention to stimuli

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Trait anxiety and stressors

• MacLeod and Mathews (1988) dot probe
• in unthreatening situation
• no difference high/low trait anxiety students in
  bias to threatening stimuli
• threatening situation (exam)
• high trait anxiety, more attendance to threat
  stimuli
• low trait anxiety, avoid threat stimuli
• attendance to threat stimuli predispose to later
  anxiety disorders?

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Preattentive versus conscious processing

• Mogg et al. (1993) emotional Stroop
• e.g. CARPET versus CANCER
• 14ms presentation plus mask
• no objective awareness of word content
• GAD patients slower colour naming of threat words
• Mogg et al. (1995) emotional dot probe
• 14ms presentation of words plus mask
• no objective awareness of word content
• GAD patients quicker on dot probe to threat
  words.
• i.e. preattentive processing in GAD.

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Attention to nonverbal stimuli

• Faces are more salient social stimuli.
• angry face clear threat
• Bradley, Mogg et al.
• faces as stimuli in dot probe task
• increased vigilance to angry faces associated
  with
• high trait anxiety
• GAD
• even when faces presented 14ms

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Face dot probe task
Probe left or right?
O

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Spider phobia and duration of attention

• Mogg Bradley
• spider phobics given dot probe task
• pictures of spiders 200, 500, 2000 ms
• phobics greater vigilance at 200ms

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Inducing anxiety

• MacLeod (1999) chapter in Handbook.
• non-anxious participants
• 684 dot probe training trials
• half in threat bias condition induced
  attentional bias towards attending threat words
  through frequency manipulations in dot probe task
• half in non-threat bias condition dot probe
  occurred in non-threatening word.
• Threat bias group
• did show attentional bias to threat
• more vulnerable to anxiety in subsequent
  stressful task.

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Criticisms of anxiety-attention findings

• Results could be explained as expertise bias
• e.g. Dalgleish ornithologists study
• but this could not apply to extinction of
  attentional bias following treatment
• Abnormal attention to any emotional stimuli
• Martin et al. (1991) report GAD patients
  increased stroop effect on happy words
• but most replication attempts failed

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Anxiety and memory
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Anxiety and memory for emotional material

• No tendency for anxious patients to show recall
  bias for threatening material
• GAD
• agoraphobics and social phobics
• spider phobics
• Watts impaired recognition of feared stimuli
• Results do not support schema model suggesting
  that anxiety results in heightened activation of
  all threat stimuli.

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Explicit and implicit memory

• Mathews et al. (1989) GAD patients/controls
• explicit or implicit (stem completion) task
• no effect GAD on explicit memory
• GAD greater implicit memory threat words
• Replicated on GAD, panic disorder, trait anxious
  students.
• However, some failures to replicate

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Clinical implications of attentional theories of
anxiety
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Implications for predicting anxiety proneness

• MacLeod Hagan (1992)
• women screened cervical cancer
• emotion Stroop task
• 8 weeks later, those diagnosed cancer assessed
  for anxiety responses
• Stroop response predicted anxiety
• better predictor than self-ratings

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Treatment implications

• Difficult to change preattentive biases?
• MacLeod, Rutherford Campbell (1997)
• 30 anxious students
• 6000 dot-probe trials, 3 weeks
• 15 students - dots biased to non-threat words
• 15 students - no bias in dot probe position
• non-threat bias condition
• attentional bias away from threat
• decline in anxiety self-ratings

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Effects of treatment on attentional biases

• Mogg et al. (1995) GAD patients
• showed emotion Stroop bias
• cognitive behavioural therapy for GAD
• after therapy no emotion bias in Stroop
• Mattia et al. (1993) social phobics
• only patients showing good recovery show decline
  in magnitude attentional bias
• Attentional measures as good index of recovery
  from anxiety disorders?

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Next lecture depression

• Effects of depression on attention
• Effects of depression on effortful processing.