Abstract
Identifying neurocognitive mechanisms underlying optimism bias is essential to understand its benefits for well-being and mental health. The combined cognitive biases hypothesis suggests that biases (e.g., in expectancies and attention) interact and mutually enforce each other. Whereas, in line with this hypothesis, optimistic expectancies have been shown to guide attention to positive information, reverse causal effects have not been investigated yet. Revealing such bidirectional optimism-attention interactions both on a behavioral and neural level could explain how cognitive biases contribute to a self-sustaining upward spiral of positivity. In this behavioral study, we hypothesized that extensive training to direct attention to positive information enhances optimism bias. To test this hypothesis, for 2 weeks, 149 participants underwent either daily online 80-trial attention bias modification training (ABMT) toward accepting faces and away from rejecting faces or neutral control training. Participants in the ABMT group were instructed to click as quickly as possible on the accepting face among 15 rejecting faces randomly displayed on a 4-by-4 matrix; participants in the control group were instructed to click on the five-petaled flower depicted among 15 seven-petaled flowers. Comparative optimism bias and state optimism were measured via questionnaires before training, after one training week, and after two training weeks. ABMT enhanced comparative optimism bias, whereas control training did not. Our findings reveal that ABMT toward positive social information causally influences comparative optimism bias and may, thereby trigger the biases’ benefits for well-being and mental health. These results can (a) stimulate future neurophysiological research in the area of positive psychology; and (b) reveal an innovative low-cost and easy-to-access intervention that may support psychotherapy in times of rising numbers of patients with psychological disorders.
Highlights
People are usually overly optimistic about their future and preferably attend to positive information around them
Comparative optimism bias regarding future positive events did not generally differ between groups, F(1,130) = 1.119, p = 0.292, ηp2 = 0.009, or change over time, when we controlled for variations in trait optimism, F(2,227) = 0.295, p = 0.714, ηp2 = 0.002
The predicted time × group interaction was significant when we controlled for variations in trait optimism, F(2,227) = 4.339, p = 0.018, ηp2 = 0.032
Summary
People are usually overly optimistic about their future (optimism bias; Weinstein, 1980) and preferably attend to positive information around them (attention bias; Pool et al, 2016). If we knew that the positivity biases mutually enforced each other (bidirectional interplay), instigating a self-perpetuating upward spiral of positive emotions (Garland et al, 2010), we could more employ the biases’ benefits in everyday life and clinical applications Theories such as the combined cognitive biases hypothesis suggest that cognitive biases (e.g., in expectancies and attention) interact and mutually enforce each other (Hirsch et al, 2006; Aue and Okon-Singer, 2015; Kress and Aue, 2017). From the combined cognitive biases hypothesis, we have recently proposed that optimism bias and positive attention bias dynamically interact and recruit a common underlying neural network This network may comprise specific activations in the anterior and posterior cingulate cortices with functional connections to the limbic system (e.g., amygdala; see Kress and Aue, 2017, for further details). We proposed potential mechanisms of neural communication that might support the bidirectional interplay between optimism and positive attention bias
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