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Key Words anxiety, depression, cognition, processing bias
Abstract A review of recent research on cognitive processing indicates that biases in attention, memory, and interpretation, as well as repetitive negative thoughts, are common across emotional disorders, although they vary in form according to type of disorder. Current cognitive models emphasize specific forms of biased processing, such as variations in the focus of attention or habitual interpretative styles that contribute to the risk of developing particular disorders. As well as predicting risk of emotional disorders, new studies have provided evidence of a causal relationship between processing bias and vulnerability. Beyond merely demonstrating the existence of biased processing, research is thus beginning to explore the cognitive causes of emotional vulnerability, and their modification.
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, we review selective information-processing biases associated with emotional vulnerability, and provide an illustrative overview of the types of cognitive models that have built on these findings to account for emotional pathology. Our review covers a diversity of cognitive processes, ranging from basic operations such as selective attention, memory, and interpretation, that occur early in the information-processing sequence and often independently of awareness or intent, to variations in later reportable cognitive products, such as intrusive thoughts, worry, or rumination. To the extent that people are aware of these cognitive products, they may attempt to control or inhibit them, sometimes successfully but sometimes with unintended negative consequences.
Given that this is the first of a new Annual Reviews series, we cannot follow the common practice of focusing on developments since the last review of the area. Instead, we describe developments in cognitive-experimental research over the last decade that we think may prove important to understanding emotional disorders, and we have favored studies using objective measures rather than those based solely on self-report. Another decision concerned whether the relevant research base should be confined to studies of clinical populations. The critical question for this review is whether certain cognitive styles constitute vulnerability factors for emotional disorders. To the extent that they do, then research on the relationship between such processes and emotion in subclinical populations is clearly relevant.
A related question is whether the cognitive variations associated with emotional vulnerability represent continuous dimensions or are discontinuous. Current research strongly suggests that processes...