For there is nothing either good or bad: a study of the mediating effect of interpretation bias on the association between mindfulness and reduced post-traumatic stress vulnerability

BACKGROUND: Despite increasing interest in the association between mindfulness and reduced trauma vulnerability, and the use of mindfulness in the latest interventions for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), few studies have examined the mechanisms through which mindfulness may influence post-trauma psychopathology. The present study aimed to determine whether negative interpretation bias, the tendency to interpret ambiguous information as negative or threatening rather than positive or safe, mediates the association between higher levels of trait mindfulness and lower levels of PTSD symptoms. Negative interpretation bias was examined due to prior evidence indicating it is associated with being less mindful and post trauma psychopathology. METHODS: The study examined 133 undergraduate students who reported exposure to one or more potentially traumatic events in their lifetime. Participants completed self-report measures of trait mindfulness (Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire – Short Form; FFMQ-SF) and PTSD symptoms (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist – Civilian version; PCL-C) as well an interpretation bias task that assessed the degree to which participants interpreted a range of everyday hypothetical scenarios to be threatening to their physical and/or psychological wellbeing. RESULTS: Results of a mediation analysis indicated a significant negative direct effect of trait mindfulness on PTSD symptomatology (p < .001). There was no evidence that negative interpretation bias mediated this relationship [BCa CI [-0.04, 0.03)], nor was it associated with trait mindfulness (p = .90) and PTSD symptomatology (p = .37). CONCLUSIONS: The results of the current study provide further evidence of the link between trait mindfulness and reduced post-trauma psychopathology while providing no support for the role of negative interpretation bias in this relationship. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12888-022-03950-y

Inhibitory attentional control in anxiety: Manipulating cognitive load in an antisaccade task

Theorists have proposed that heightened anxiety vulnerability is characterised by reduced attentional control performance and have made the prediction in turn that elevating cognitive load will adversely impact attentional control performance for high anxious individuals to a greater degree than low anxious individuals. Critically however, existing attempts to test this prediction have been limited in their methodology and have presented inconsistent findings. Using a methodology capable of overcoming the limitations of previous research, the present study sought to investigate the effect of manipulating cognitive load on inhibitory attentional control performance of high anxious and low anxious individuals. High and low trait anxious participants completed an antisaccade task, requiring the execution of prosaccades towards, or antisaccades away from, emotionally toned stimuli while eye movements were recorded. Participants completed the antisaccade task under conditions that concurrently imposed a lesser cognitive load, or greater cognitive load. Analysis of participants’ saccade latencies revealed high trait anxious participants demonstrated generally poorer inhibitory attentional control performance as compared to low trait anxious participants. Furthermore, conditions imposing greater cognitive load, as compared to lesser cognitive load, resulted in enhanced inhibitory attentional control performance across participants generally. Crucially however, analyses did not reveal an effect of cognitive load condition on anxiety-linked differences in inhibitory attentional control performance, indicating that elevating cognitive load did not adversely impact attentional control performance for high anxious individuals to a greater degree than low anxious individuals. Hence, the present findings are inconsistent with predictions made by some theorists and are in contrast to the findings of earlier investigations. These findings further highlight the need for research into the relationship between anxiety, attentional control, and cognitive load

The role of performance beliefs in the difference between self-report and behavioural measures of attentional control and their relationship with anxiety

While empirical findings closely link poor attentional control with elevated anxiety, this relationship is more consistently evident and stronger when attentional control is measured through self-report than through behaviour. One possible explanation for these diverging findings is that people lack insight into their attentional control capabilities, and people with elevated anxiety hold more negative beliefs about their level of attentional control, resulting in lower self-reported levels of attentional control. In two studies, participants (N = 78 and N = 207) completed the attentional control scale, the attentional network test (ANT), a questionnaire measuring beliefs about attentional control in the ANT, and a measure of anxiety. In both studies, no significant associations were present between beliefs about attentional control in the ANT and participants' performance on the ANT, suggesting a lack of insight in attentional control capabilities. Both studies further demonstrated that only beliefs about attentional control but not performance in the ANT were related to self-reported attentional control and anxiety. We thus show that evidence supporting the relationship between self-reported attentional control and anxiety is driven by biased beliefs about ability to control attention in people with heightened anxiety, and not by behavioural indices of attentional control.</p

Assessing distress tolerance using a modified version of the Emotional Image Tolerance task

The Emotional Image Tolerance (EIT) task assesses tolerance of negative emotion induced by negatively valenced images. We made several minor modifications to the task (Study 1) and adapted the task to include positive and neutral images in order to assess whether individuals respond to the valence or the intensity of the image content (Study 2). In both studies, we assessed subjective distress, gender differences in task responses, and associations between behavioral and self-reported distress tolerance, and related constructs. Across both studies, the EIT successfully induced distress and gender differences were observed, with females generally indicating more distress than males. In Study 2, responses on the adapted EIT task were correlated with self-reported distress tolerance, rumination, and emotion reactivity. The EIT successfully induces distress and the correlations in Study 2 provide promising evidence of validity