Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2022 Aug 15;18(8):e1010176. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010176. eCollection 2022 Aug.
Individuals prone to anxiety and depression often report beliefs and make judgements about themselves that are more negative than those reported by others. We use computational modeling of a richly naturalistic task to disentangle the role of negative priors versus negatively biased belief updating and to investigate their association with different dimensions of Internalizing psychopathology. Undergraduate participants first provided profiles for a hypothetical tech internship. They then viewed pairs of other profiles and selected the individual they would prefer to work alongside out of each pair. In a subsequent phase of the experiment, participants made judgments about their relative popularity as hypothetical internship partners both before any feedback and after each of 20 items of feedback revealing whether or not they had been selected as the preferred teammate from a given pairing. Scores on latent factors of general negative affect, anxiety-specific affect and depression-specific affect were estimated using participants' self-report scores on standardized measures of anxiety and depression together with factor loadings from a bifactor analysis conducted previously. Higher scores on the depression-specific factor were linked to more negative prior beliefs but were not associated with differences in belief updating. In contrast, higher scores on the anxiety-specific factor were associated with a negative bias in belief updating but no difference in prior beliefs. These findings indicate that, to at least some extent, distinct processes may impact the formation of belief priors and in-the-moment belief updating and that these processes may be differentially disrupted in depression and anxiety. Future directions for enquiry include examination of the possibility that prior beliefs biases in depression might reflect generalization from prior experiences or global schema whereas belief updating biases in anxiety might be more situationally specific.
个体容易焦虑和抑郁时，经常会对自己做出比他人更负面的评价和判断。我们通过对一个丰富的自然主义任务进行计算建模，来区分消极先验和负面偏差信念更新的作用，并研究它们与内化性精神病理学的不同维度的关联。本科参与者首先为一个假设的技术实习提供个人资料。然后，他们查看了其他两个个人资料，并从每个对中选择了他们更愿意与之共事的个人。在实验的后续阶段，参与者在没有任何反馈之前以及在 20 个反馈项中的每一项之后，对他们作为假设实习伙伴的相对受欢迎程度做出判断，这些反馈项揭示了他们是否从给定的配对中被选为首选队友。使用参与者在标准化焦虑和抑郁量表上的自我报告分数以及之前进行的双因素分析的因子负荷，估计了一般负性情绪、焦虑特异性情绪和抑郁特异性情绪的潜在因素分数。抑郁特异性因素的得分越高，与更消极的先验信念相关，但与信念更新的差异无关。相比之下，焦虑特异性因素的得分越高，与信念更新的负面偏差相关，但与先验信念的差异无关。这些发现表明，至少在某种程度上，不同的过程可能会影响信念先验和即时信念更新的形成，而这些过程在抑郁和焦虑中可能会受到不同的干扰。未来的研究方向包括检验抑郁中的先验信念偏差是否可能反映从先前经验或全局模式的泛化，而焦虑中的信念更新偏差是否更具情境特异性的可能性。
