Information processing biases: The effects of negative emotional symptoms on sampling pleasant and unpleasant information.

Although theories of emotion associate negative emotional symptoms with cognitive biases in information processing, they rarely specify the details. Here, we characterize cognitive biases in information processing of and information, and how these biases covary with anxious and depressive symptoms, while controlling for general stress and cognitive ability. Forty undergraduates provided emotional symptom scores (Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21) and performed a statistical learning task that required predicting the next sound in a long sequence of either or naturalistic sounds (blocks). We used an information weights framework to determine if the degree of behavioral change associated with observing either ("B" follows "A") or ("B" does not follow "A") transitions differs for and sounds. Bayesian mixed-effects models revealed that negative emotional symptom scores predicted performance as well as processing biases of and information. Further, information weights differed between and information, and importantly, this difference varied based on symptom scores. For example, higher depressive symptom scores predicted a bias of underutilizing disconfirmatory information in content. These findings have implications for models of emotional disorders by offering a mechanistic explanation and formalization of the associated cognitive biases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).