Some people expect things to go wrong in their lives, and this negative cognitive bias in their thinking can aggravate and maintain clinical anxiety and depression disorders. These researchers evaluated whether an online treatment could reduce negative bias and lead to improved mental health. They conducted an experiment with over 900 participants organized into five groups including two positive treatment groups, two half-positive/half-negative treatment groups, and one neutral control group. Participants in the two positive treatment groups showed more improvement in cognitive bias than either of the other three groups, and this relative improvement persisted over a one-month period.
One of the interesting things about this study is this: it shows that an online, self-directed treatment can be effective. Perhaps surprisingly, though, participants in all five groups, including the control group, showed improvements in their levels of anxiety or depression. I suspect this general improvement across the board may have occurred because most participants expected to experience less anxiety and depression as a result of whatever treatment they received, and so they did.
Abstract
Negative future thinking pervades emotional disorders. This hybrid efficacy–effectiveness trial tested a four-session, scalable online cognitive-bias-modification program for training more positive episodic prediction. Nine hundred fifty-eight adults (73.3% female, 86.5% White, 83.4% from United States) were randomly assigned to positive conditions with ambiguous future scenarios that ended positively, 50/50 conditions that ended positively or negatively, or a control condition with neutral scenarios. As hypothesized, positive-training participants improved more than control participants in negative expectancy bias (d = −0.58), positive expectancy bias (d = 0.80), and self-efficacy (d = 0.29). Positive training was also superior to 50/50 training for expectancy bias and optimism (d = 0.31). Training gains attenuated yet remained by 1-month follow-up. Unexpectedly, participants across conditions improved comparably in anxiety and depression symptoms and growth mindset. Targeting a transdiagnostic process with a scalable program may improve bias and outlook; however, further validation of outcome measures is required.
Citation
Eberle, J. W., Boukhechba, M., Sun, J., Zhang, D., Funk, D. H., Barnes, L. E., & Teachman, B. A. (2023). Shifting episodic prediction with online cognitive bias modification: a randomized controlled trial. Clinical Psychological Science, 11(5), 819-840.
Dr Martin Fracker 