Cognitive biases

Question 1

Define cognitive bias

Answer 1

systematic errors in thinking that affect everyone

Question 2

Why care about cognitive biases

Answer 2

• Patterns of attending and thinking anxiety and depression
  
  • In attention, interpretation and memory
  • Understanding basic cognitive processes informs theory
    
    • Treatment development

Question 3

types of bias

Answer 3

• attentional
• interpretative
• memory
• self-serving
• optimism

Question 4

define attentional bias

Answer 4

systematic attentional selection of negative over competing neutral stimuli

Question 5

define interpretative bias

Answer 5

tendency to interpret ambiguous info as negative

Question 6

define memory bias

Answer 6

enhanced memory performance for negative than neutral information
- implicit: relatively automatic
- explicit: effortful and conscious

Question 7

application

Answer 7

• cog biases depression and anxiety by schema theory

Question 8

evidence of training transfer effects

Answer 8

ABM: interpretative bias anxiety
CBM-I attentional bias anxiety
CBM I memory bias for resolutions
ABM explicit memory bias depression

Question 9

evaluation

Answer 9

• reliance on info processing metaphor
• methods reliability e.g dot probe task
• publication bias
• small samples
• mixed evidence

Question 10

decision making

Answer 10

hard to approach important decision rationally and systematically - humans only have limited capacity for reasoning according to logic and probability theory = only rely on heuristics (rules of thumb, short cuts for selecting actions)

Question 11

belief dependent realism

Answer 11

the process by which our perceptions of reality are dependent on the beliefs we hold