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Experienced disgust causes a negative interpretation bias: A causal role for disgust in anxious psychopathology.

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 18:07 authored by Graham Davey, Sarah Bickerstaffe, Benie MacDonald
This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating the effect of induced disgust on interpretational bias using the homophone spelling task. Four groups of participants experienced a disgust, anxiety, happy or neutral mood induction and then completed the homophone spelling task which requires the participant to interpret ambiguous words presented through headphones. Both the disgust and anxiety groups interpreted significantly more threat/neutral homophones as threat than both the happy and neutral groups; the disgust group also interpreted significantly fewer positive/neutral homophones as positive than the happy group. These findings are consistent with the view that induced disgust causes a negative interpretational bias which is similar to that reported for anxiety. The results could not be interpreted in terms of the disgust induction concurrently raising levels of self-reported anxiety, but could be interpreted in terms of disgust maintaining existing levels of anxiety. The effect of disgust was to facilitate negative interpretations rather than emotional interpretations regardless of valence. These findings provide the basis for a causal role for disgust in anxious psychopathology. Because the effect is a non-specific emotion-congruent one, elevated disgust levels will result in a predisposition to interpret information in a threatening way across a broad range of anxious- and threat-relevant domains.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Behaviour Research and Therapy

ISSN

0140-525X

Issue

10

Volume

44

Page range

1375-1384

Pages

10.0

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Notes

First author: second author UG student, MacDonald a RF on Davey's grant

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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