Neurocognitive mechanisms of change following Preventive Cognitive Therapy for preventing relapse in depression: a randomized controlled trial.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a prevalent psychiatric disorder, characterized by high relapse risk. With every new episode, risk for relapse increases. This makes preventing relapse an important clinical target in limiting the personal and societal burden of MDD. Preventive Cognitive Therapy (PCT) is a protocolized psychological therapy which has shown to lower relapse risk. How PCT attains its effects needs further elucidation. Understanding the treatment mechanisms provides a window to identify critical target points to prevent depressive relapse. In this randomized controlled trial, 50 patients remitted from at least two depressive episodes in the past five years were randomized to eight sessions of PCT (n=25) or to a waiting list condition (n=25) in the context of the NEWPRIDE trial. Primary outcome measures were changes in brain activation during effortful emotion regulation and in biased processing, covering both negative and positive valence dimensions. All patients were assessed twice (baseline and three-month follow-up) for these outcome measures, as well as their diagnosis, symptomatology, cognitive and affective reactivity, and emotion regulation styles. Linear Mixed Models and Repeated Measures ANOVAs were conducted to objectify the immediate changes induced by the therapy in brain reactivity, and clinical and cognitive measures. Following PCT, patients showed decreased recruitment of dorsomedial prefrontal regions during upregulation of positive affect and stable recruitment of the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex during regulation of emotions over valences, compared to the waiting list. No effects on biased processing of emotional information were observed. Furthermore, PCT resulted in a lower increase of depressive symptomatology over three months as compared to the waiting list condition. Finally, PCT resulted in increased activation of positive thoughts following reading positive self-related scenarios, lower responsivity of negative affect to negative stimuli and increased successful application of cognitive reappraisal to modify affective states. These results suggest that PCT obtains its relapse preventing effects by targeting mechanisms that underpin regulation of mood. More specifically, changes in regulation of positive affect and content of positive cognitions may decrease negative mood and affect. This supports cross-valence compensatory models of cognitive therapy and suggests that strengthening and shifting cognition and affect to more positive content may guard against the activation of negative cognitions and affect in the face of daily hassles and life events.

Passionately Motivated Reasoning: Biased Processing of Passion-Threatening Messages

Objective: When facing setbacks and obstacles, the dualistic model of passion outlines that obsessive passion, and not harmonious passion, will predict greater levels of defensiveness (Vallerand, 2015). Our aim was to determine if these passion dimensions predicted defensiveness in the same way when confronted with threatening messages targeting the decision to pursue a passion.Method: Across four studies with passionate Facebook users, hockey fans, and runners (total N = 763), participants viewed messages giving reasons why their favorite activity should not be pursued. Participants either reported their desire to read the messages (Studies 1 and 2) or evaluated the messages after reading them (Studies 3 and 4).Results: Harmonious passion consistently predicted higher levels of avoidance or negative evaluations of the messages. These responses were attenuated for participants who had previously affirmed an important value (Study 1), or who were told that they do not control the passions they pursue (Study 4).Conclusions: Harmonious passion entails a sense of autonomy and control over activity engagement, which usually leads to non-defensive behavior. However, this sense of control may elicit more defensive responses from more harmoniously passionate individuals when the decision itself to pursue an activity is under attack.

Can I Stick to My Guns? Motivated Reasoning and Biased Processing of Balanced Political Information

News media offer balanced political messages and many citizens also seek content that presents two sides of a political issue. Despite this supply and demand, most work on information processing tests exposure to one-sided content, i.e., either pro- or counter-attitudinal. We advance this work by studying (1) how balanced and one-sided messages affect information processing; (2) whether the processing of balanced information is moderated by individual motivations; and (3) the impact of balanced exposure on attitude polarization. Using an online experiment (N = 677), we primed either accuracy or defensive motivation and examined how participants processed information about two distinct issues (i.e., climate change and Syrian refugees). On both issues, participants were less biased in response to balanced content, compared to one-sided content. In addition, defensive and accuracy motivated people processed balanced content in a similar manner. Furthermore, pro-attitudinal content polarized individual attitudes, but not balanced content, and this effect was not moderated by motivation.

Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content

People tend to interpret political information in a manner that confirms their prior beliefs, a cognitive bias that contributes to rising political polarization. In this study, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging with semantic content analyses to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real-world political content. We scanned American participants with conservative-leaning or liberal-leaning immigration attitudes while they watched news clips, campaign ads, and public speeches related to immigration policy. We searched for evidence of “neural polarization”: activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content. Neural polarization in the DMPFC intensified during moments in the videos that included risk-related and moral-emotional language, highlighting content features most likely to drive divergent interpretations between conservatives and liberals. Finally, participants whose DMPFC activity closely matched that of the average conservative or the average liberal participant were more likely to change their attitudes in the direction of that group’s position. Our work introduces a multimethod approach to study the neural basis of political cognition in naturalistic settings. Using this approach, we characterize how political attitudes biased information processing in the brain, the language most likely to drive polarized neural responses, and the consequences of biased processing for attitude change. Together, these results shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.

Mistrust and misinformation: A two-component, socio-epistemic model of belief in conspiracy theories

Although conspiracy theories are endorsed by about half the population and occasionally turn out to be true, they are more typically false beliefs that, by definition, have a paranoid theme. Consequently, psychological research to date has focused on determining whether there are traits that account for belief in conspiracy theories (BCT) within a deficit model. Alternatively, a two-component, socio-epistemic model of BCT is proposed that seeks to account for the ubiquity of conspiracy theories, their variance along a continuum, and the inconsistency of research findings likening them to psychopathology. Within this model, epistemic mistrust is the core component underlying conspiracist ideation that manifests as the rejection of authoritative information, focuses the specificity of conspiracy theory beliefs, and can sometimes be understood as a sociocultural response to breaches of trust, inequities of power, and existing racial prejudices. Once voices of authority are negated due to mistrust, the resulting epistemic vacuum can send individuals “down the rabbit hole” looking for answers where they are vulnerable to the biased processing of information and misinformation within an increasingly “post-truth” world. The two-component, socio-epistemic model of BCT argues for mitigation strategies that address both mistrust and misinformation processing, with interventions for individuals, institutions of authority, and society as a whole.

Priming Self-Affirmation Reduces the Negative Impact of High Rape Myth Acceptance: Assessing Women’s Perceptions and Judgments of Sexual Assault

Researchers have theorized and empirically shown that compared with low rape myth acceptance (RMA) individuals, those high in RMA are more likely to discount rape prevention messages. These researchers have urged the development of approaches to counteract the defensiveness and related processes that are presumed to cause such discounting. In the present research we empirically tested the effectiveness of a self-affirmation approach designed to reduce defensiveness to and increase engagement with important but potentially self-threatening information about sexual assault. Female participants classified as low or high in RMA were randomly assigned to either a self-affirmation or no-affirmation control condition and then read about a controversial case of campus sexual assault. We found support for the effectiveness of such a self-affirmation intervention for high-RMA women. Specifically, on a questionnaire administered after the exposure, affirmed high-RMA women relative to the control group reported greater endorsement of the realistic use of the “yes means yes” standard of consent, higher self-standards in defining consensual sexual behavior, increases in perceived knowledge of available resources for sexual assault victims, lower support of rape myths, and greater support for punishing someone convicted of sexual assault. As expected, for women low in RMA there were no significant differences in reporting on these measures between the affirmation condition and the no-affirmation condition. From an agentic perspective these results are encouraging. This approach may merit further development as part of an intervention for reducing biased processing and increasing the effectiveness of consent campaigns and other sexual violence prevention programs.

Mistrust and Misinformation: A Two-Component, Socio-Epistemic Model of Belief in Conspiracy Theories

Although conspiracy theories are endorsed by about half the population and occasionally turn out to be true, they are more typically false beliefs that, by definition, have a paranoid theme. Consequently, psychological research to date has focused on determining whether there are traits that account for belief in conspiracy theories (BCT) within a deficit model. Alternatively, a two-component, socio-epistemic model of BCT is proposed that seeks to account for the ubiquity of conspiracy theories, their variance along a continuum, and the inconsistency of research findings likening them to psychopathology. Within this model, epistemic mistrust is the core component underlying conspiracist ideation that manifests as the rejection of authoritative information, focuses the specificity of conspiracy theory beliefs, and can sometimes be understood as a sociocultural response to breaches of trust, inequities of power, and existing racial prejudices. Once voices of authority are negated due to mistrust, the resulting epistemic vacuum can send individuals “down the rabbit hole” looking for answers where they are vulnerable to the biased processing of information and misinformation within an increasingly “post-truth” world. The two-component, socio-epistemic model of BCT argues for mitigation strategies that address both mistrust and misinformation processing, with interventions for individuals, institutions of authority, and society as a whole.

Credibility Perceptions and Detection Accuracy of Fake News Headlines on Social Media: Effects of Truth-Bias and Endorsement Cues

This article focuses on message credibility and detection accuracy of fake and real news as represented on social media. We developed a deception detection paradigm for news headlines and conducted two online experiments to examine the extent to which people (1) perceive news headlines as credible, and (2) accurately distinguish fake and real news across three general topics (i.e., politics, science, and health). Both studies revealed that people often judged news headlines as fake, suggesting a deception-bias for news in social media. Across studies, we observed an average detection accuracy of approximately 51%, a level consistent with most research using this deception detection paradigm with equal lie-truth base-rates. Study 2 evaluated the effects of endorsement cues in social media (e.g., Facebook likes) on message credibility and detection accuracy. Results showed that headlines associated with a high number of Facebook likes increased credibility, thereby enhancing detection accuracy for real news but undermining accuracy for fake news. These studies introduce truth-default theory to the context of news credibility and advance our understanding of how biased processing of news information can impact detection accuracy with social media endorsement cues.

Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content

People tend to interpret political information in a manner that confirms their prior beliefs, a cognitive bias that contributes to rising political polarization. In this study, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging with semantic content analyses to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real-world political content. We scanned American participants with conservative-leaning or liberal-leaning immigration attitudes while they watched news clips, campaign ads, and public speeches related to immigration policy. We searched for evidence of “neural polarization”: activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content. Neural polarization in the DMPFC intensified during moments in the videos that included risk-related and moral-emotional language, highlighting content features most likely to drive divergent interpretations between conservatives and liberals. Finally, participants whose DMPFC activity closely matched that of the average conservative or the average liberal participant were more likely to change their attitudes in the direction of that group’s position. Our work introduces a novel multi-method approach to study the neural basis of political cognition in naturalistic settings. Using this approach, we characterize how political attitudes biased information processing in the brain, the language most likely to drive polarized neural responses, and the consequences of biased processing for attitude change. Together, these results shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.Significance StatementPartisan biases in processing political information contribute to rising divisions in society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content, and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos. These findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.