Abstract
Cognitive theory predicts that depression is associated with a bias to interpret ambiguous information in a mood-congruent fashion. This negative interpretative bias may serve as a maintenance factor for the continuation of a depressed mood state. The majority of studies investigating such interpretative biases suffer from a variety of methodological problems. This research has utilized an objective physiological measure involving the affective modulation of the human eye blink reflex in 25 depressed and 25 control subjects by depressive, depressive-ambiguous, and distorted stimuli. Almost half of the depressed subjects suffered from a comorbid anxiety disorder. In contrast to previous research utilizing the same methodology, depressed participants did not react differently to non-depressed participants in terms of their blink reflex response to the various stimuli types. This outcome is ascribed to the exclusion of anxiety-related stimuli in the current study. Depression-related stimuli failed to augment blink amplitudes in both subject groups. Therefore, affective modulation of the startle reflex is an ineffective methodology for the detection of depression-linked interpretative biases, as there is no difference to how individuals react to depressive and neutral stimuli. In this study, patients diagnosed with social anxiety disorder reacted to difficult-to-identify stimuli with augmented blink amplitudes, interpreted as an anxiety response.
Highlights
The cognitive distortion known as interpretative bias—a propensity to interpret ambiguous or innocuous events and situations in a negative fashion—has long been associated with depressive illnesses (Beck, 1967, 1976)
The difficulties and criticisms associated with previous research into depression-linked negative interpretative biases prompted the development of a novel objective methodology that was seemingly immune to such concerns
The recorded blink amplitude EMG data was analysed in a mixed-design General Linear Model of analysis of variance (ANOVA)
Summary
The cognitive distortion known as interpretative bias—a propensity to interpret ambiguous or innocuous events and situations in a negative fashion—has long been associated with depressive illnesses (Beck, 1967, 1976). Previous papers investigating the existence of negative interpretative biases for ambiguous information in depression have relied primarily upon subjective experimental methodologies such as self-report (e.g., Watkins & Rush, 1983; Nunn, Mathews, & Trower, 1997) or evaluative feedback (e.g., Gotlib, 1983; Vestre & Caulfield, 1986) experiments This body of research is plagued by mixed results and methodological limitations such as experimenter demand effects, response selection biases, and depression-linked autobiographical memory influences (Clark & Teasdale, 1985; Williams & Broadbent, 1986; MacLeod & Mathews, 1991). The reflex is facilitated when an organism is exposed to an aversive or negative stimulus and inhibited when the appetitive motivational system is activated by a hedonic or positive stimulus (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1992)
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