Dapprich Anna L, Becker Eni S, Derks Laura M, Legenbauer Tanja, Lange Wolf-Gero
Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, 500 HB, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
LWL-University Hospital Hamm for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health. 2023 Mar 31;17(1):46. doi: 10.1186/s13034-023-00585-z.
Threatening and hostile interpretation biases are seen as causal and maintaining mechanisms of childhood anxiety and aggression, respectively. However, it is unclear whether these interpretation biases are specific to distinct problems or whether they are general psychopathological phenomena. The specificity versus pervasiveness of interpretation biases could also differ depending on mental health status. Therefore, in the current study, we investigated whether social anxiety and callous-unemotional (CU) traits were uniquely related to threatening and hostile interpretation biases, respectively, in both a community and a clinical sample of adolescents.
A total of 161 adolescents between 10 to 15 years of age participated. The community sample consisted of 88 participants and the clinical sample consisted of 73 inpatients with a variety of psychological disorders. Social anxiety and CU-traits were assessed with self-report questionnaires. The Ambiguous Social Scenario Task was used to measure both threatening and hostile interpretations in response to written vignettes.
Results showed that social anxiety was uniquely related to more threatening interpretations, while CU-traits were uniquely related to more hostile interpretations. These relationships were replicated for the community sample. For the clinical sample, only the link between social anxiety and threatening interpretations was significant. Explorative analyses showed that adolescents with externalizing disorders scored higher on hostile interpretations than adolescents with internalizing disorders.
Overall, these results support the content-specificity of threatening interpretation biases in social anxiety and of hostile interpretation biases in CU-traits. Better understanding the roles of interpretation biases in different psychopathologies might open avenues for tailored prevention and intervention paradigms.
威胁性和敌意性解释偏差分别被视为儿童焦虑和攻击行为的因果及维持机制。然而，尚不清楚这些解释偏差是特定于不同问题，还是普遍的精神病理现象。解释偏差的特异性与普遍性也可能因心理健康状况而异。因此，在本研究中，我们调查了在青少年的社区样本和临床样本中，社交焦虑和冷酷无情（CU）特质是否分别与威胁性和敌意性解释偏差存在独特关联。
共有161名10至15岁的青少年参与。社区样本包括88名参与者，临床样本包括73名患有各种心理障碍的住院患者。通过自我报告问卷评估社交焦虑和CU特质。使用模糊社交情景任务来测量对书面 vignettes 的威胁性和敌意性解释。
结果表明，社交焦虑与更多的威胁性解释存在独特关联，而CU特质与更多的敌意性解释存在独特关联。这些关系在社区样本中得到了重复验证。对于临床样本，只有社交焦虑与威胁性解释之间的联系是显著的。探索性分析表明，外化障碍青少年在敌意性解释上的得分高于内化障碍青少年。
总体而言，这些结果支持了社交焦虑中威胁性解释偏差以及CU特质中敌意性解释偏差的内容特异性。更好地理解解释偏差在不同精神病理学中的作用可能为量身定制的预防和干预模式开辟道路。
