Enduring consequences of experimentally induced biases in interpretation

Jenny Yiend, Bundy Mackintosh, Andrew Mathews

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

111 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that it is possible to induce biases in the interpretation of ambiguous text passages by training. Participants consistently trained to interpret emotionally ambiguous passages in either a negative or positive direction show training-congruent effects when presented with new ambiguous material. These training effects are demonstrated by participants’ subsequent recognition ratings for disambiguating sentences, which represent both possible meanings of the novel ambiguous test passages.

In this series of experiments, we investigated the durability of these training effects over time spans of up to 1 day and found them to be robust. The findings encourage us to believe that induced biases may serve as a useful analogue to those observed clinically.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)779-797
Number of pages19
JournalBehaviour Research and Therapy
Volume43
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2005

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