The Time-Course of Induced Interpretive Biases in Healthy Individuals Varying in Depressive Symptoms

Cognitive theories of depression posit that after a negative event or mood state, those vulnerable to the disorder automatically impose negative interpretations on ambiguous information. However, empirical research on depression-linked interpretive biases has yielded mixed results, likely due to flawed experimental paradigms and statistical techniques that do not adequately control for anxiety. Cognitive Bias Modification for Interpretation (CBM-I) is an innovative research paradigm that involves inducing interpretive biases in an experimentally controlled manner. The current study is the first to assess whether cognitive bias modification influences interpretation differently according to vulnerability to depression. Individuals scoring lower and higher on a depression inventory judged the relatedness of either neutrally valenced (e.g. book-read) or negatively valenced (e.g. sick-vomit) word-pairs. They then made judgements about homophone word-pairs, in which the first word could be interpreted as either neutral in meaning (e.g. dye-ink) or negative in meaning (e.g. die-death). At the later stages of processing all individuals, regardless of depression scores, resolved ambiguous word-pairs in a training-congruent manner, consistent with previous CBM-I studies. However, in the early stages of processing, those scoring higher, but not lower in the depression inventory, were uniquely receptive to negative context training, such that they were more likely to interpret ambiguous word-pairs in a negative as opposed to neutral manner. This finding is crucially important, as it helps to clarify theoretical debate in the literature.