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.
Continue reading “Reducing Negative Bias in Future Expectations with an Online Self-Directed Intervention”Category: Clinical Psychological Science
How Does Culture Influence Mental Health Attitudes?
Clinical psychology originally developed in the Western World, primarily in Europe and North America. As a result, it is often not clear whether psychotherapies known to help clients in Western cultures will also be effective with individuals in other cultures. The following series of experiments was designed to determine whether attitudes towards psychotherapy in Chinese culture may make individuals less likely to seek out help when they need it.
I particularly like this study for two reasons. First, the researchers took an empirical approach with four controlled experiments, with each subsequent experiment designed to answer questions raised by the previous experiment. Second, rather than ask study participants about their attitudes, the researchers assessed attitudes indirectly from their behavioral intentions: would participants recommend psychotherapy for an individual described in a series of scenarios.
This study was also particularly clever in how it used language (English or Chinese) to prime cultural attitudes among the participants. Conducted by Heller, Grant, Yasui, and Keysar, these four experiments were reported in a special issue of Clinical Psychological Science focused on cultural issues in clinical psychology.
Continue reading “How Does Culture Influence Mental Health Attitudes?”
Dr Martin Fracker 