Search results for "Cognitive bias"
showing 10 items of 35 documents
Cognitive biases in humanitarian sensemaking and decision-making lessons from field research
2016
Time and again, humanitarian decision-makers are confronted with stress and pressure, distorted, lacking and uncertain information, and thus they are working in conditions that are known to introduce or enforce biases. Decision analysis has been designed to overcome such biases, and a network of “digital responders” organized over the Internet has set out to improve judgments by providing better information. However, without any structured support to determine objectives, goals and preferences and detached from the context of operational decision-makers, remote analysts may face the very biases they are trying to help overcome. This article sets out to identify biases that matter for humani…
Cognitive Biases in Pathological Health Anxiety
2016
Pathological health anxiety refers to the medically unfounded fear of suffering from a severe illness. Differences in cognitive processes related to attention, memory, and evaluation of health threat have been hypothesized to underlie pathological health anxiety. In no study, however, have researchers systematically and simultaneously assessed different cognitive biases. On the basis of the idea that multiple cognitive biases simultaneously contribute to psychopathology (the combined-cognitive-bias hypothesis), we compared 88 patients with pathological health anxiety, 52 patients with depressive disorder, and 52 healthy participants on their performance in several cognitive tasks involving…
Memory bias for schema-related stimuli in individuals with bulimia nervosa
2010
This study investigates whether individuals with bulimia nervosa (BN) have a memory bias in relation to explicit memory (cued and free recall vs. verbal and pictorial recognition tasks). Twenty-five participants diagnosed with BN and 27 normal controls (NC) were exposed to body-related, food-related, and neutral TV commercials, and then recall and recognition rates were assessed. Poorer recognition and recall of body-related stimuli was found for BN in comparison to NC, suggesting a memory bias. Results are discussed in relation to previous studies, along with suggestions as to how future studies can gain more insight into dysfunctions in information processing that can lead to the maintena…
Influence of appearance-related TV commercials on body image state.
2008
This study investigates the influence of media exposure on body image state in eating-disordered (ED) patients. The attitudinal and perceptual components of body image are assessed, as well as any associations with dysfunctional cognitions and behavioral consequences. Twenty-five ED patients and 25 non-ED controls (ND) viewed commercials either featuring appearance (AC; 5 min) or not featuring appearance (NC; 5 min). Both perceptual and attitudinal body image components changed markedly after the AC condition for ED patients, compared with the ND group and NC condition. Cognitions referring to dietary restraint and internalization/social comparison also changed significantly in ED patients…
Emotion recognition, emotional awareness and cognitive bias in individuals with bulimia nervosa
2008
Difficulties recognizing emotion have been reported for eating disordered individuals in relation to perception of emotions in others and emotional self-awareness. It remains unclear whether this is a perceptual or cognitive-affective problem. Clarification is sought and the question of a cognitive bias is addressed when interpreting facially expressed emotions. Twenty participants with bulimia nervosa (BN) and 20 normal controls (NC) were assessed for ability to recognize emotional and neutral expressions. Emotional self-awareness was also assessed. Significant differences were found for emotional self-awareness. For emotional faces, only a poorer recognition of the emotion, surprise, for …
Attentional capture by emotional scenes across episodes in bipolar disorder: Evidence from a free-viewing task
2015
We examined whether the initial orienting, subsequent engagement, and overall allocation of attention are determined exogenously (i.e. by the affective valence of the stimulus) or endogenously (i.e. by the participant's mood) in the manic, depressive and euthymic episodes of bipolar disorder (BD). Participants were asked to compare the affective valence of two pictures (happy/threatening/neutral [emotional] vs. neutral [control]) while their eye movements were recorded in a free-viewing task. Results revealed that the initial orienting was exogenously captured by emotional images relative to control images. Importantly, engagement and overall allocation were endogenously captured by threate…
Explicit and implicit memory biases in depression and panic disorder.
2000
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the presence of a bias for emotional information (panic-related, depression-related, positive and neutral) in explicit memory and implicit memory (by means of free recall and word-stem completion tasks, respectively) among depressed (N=20) and panic (N=20) patients. Three different encoding conditions (graphemic, semantic and self-reference) were used. The results of this study failed to show the existence of a mood-congruent memory bias for both implicit and explicit memory in these emotional disorders. According to the correlational analyses performed, differences among categories of emotional words meant less than the difference among v…
Attentional Biases and Vulnerability to Depression
1999
This study was designed to examine selective processing of emotional information in depression. It focuses on possible attentional biases in depression, and whether such biases constitute a cognitive vulnerability factor to suffer from the disorder or, on the contrary, they reflect a feature associated exclusively with the clinical level of depression. 81 participants were included in the study: 15 with a diagnosis of Major Depression; 17 were diagnosed as Dysthymia; 11 participants scored over 18 in the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979); 15 participants, in whom a sad mood state was induced by an experimental mood induction (Velten technique + music, or biographic…
Illusory inferences from a disjunction of conditionals: a new mental models account
2000
(Johnson-Laird, P.N., & Savary, F. (1999, Illusory inferences: a novel class of erroneous deductions. Cognition, 71, 191-229.) have recently presented a mental models account, based on the so-called principle of truth, for the occurrence of inferences that are compelling but invalid. This article presents an alternative account of the illusory inferences resulting from a disjunction of conditionals. In accordance with our modified theory of mental models of the conditional, we show that the way individuals represent conditionals leads them to misinterpret the locus of the disjunction and prevents them from drawing conclusions from a false conditional, thus accounting for the compelling char…
Cognitive Biases and Decision Making in Gambling
2010
Heuristics and cognitive biases can occur in reasoning and decision making. Some of them are very common in gamblers (illusion of control, representativeness, availability, etc.). Structural characteristics and functioning of games of chance favor the appearance of these biases. Two experiments were conducted with nonpathological gamblers. The first experiment was a game of dice with wagers. In the second experiment, the participants played two bingo games. Specific rules of the games favored the appearance of cognitive bias (illusion of control) and heuristics (representativeness and availability) and influence on the bets. Results and implications for gambling are discussed.