Cognitive Bias

What Is Cognitive Bias?

Disorders That May Be Maintained by Cognitive Bias

Cognitive biases, including biased interpretations, attributions, expectancies, or heuristics, are thought to contribute to the maintenance of:

• panic disorder (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias, emotional reasoning);
• specific phobia (expectancy bias, emotional reasoning);
• social phobia (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias);
• obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) (attribution bias, expectancy bias, emotional reasoning);
• post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias, emotional reasoning);
• generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias, emotional reasoning);
• pain disorder (interpretation bias, expectancy bias);
• health anxiety (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias);
• eating disorders (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias);
• depression (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias);
• bipolar disorder (attribution bias);
• psychosis (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias);
• substance misuse (interpretation bias, attribution bias, expectancy bias).

Helpful Questions for Assessing Cognitive Bias

Some helpful questions for assessing cognitive bias:

• What do you think will happen if you do X or Y?
• What predictions are you making in this situation?
• What sort of evidence are you using to make this judgment or prediction?
• What do you expect will happen here?
• How do you know what will happen?

Treatment Approaches That Target Cognitive Bias

A wide range of treatment interventions are designed to target cognitive bias. These can include:

• data gathering exercises that aim to overcome attentional biases;
• thought-challenging exercises that aim to identify and then overcome cognitive distortions;
• exposure and behavioral experiments that target expectancy biases.

References

• Beck, A. T. (1963). Thinking and depression: I. Idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions. Archives of General Psychiatry, 9(4), 324–333.
• Harvey, A. G., Watkins, E., Mansell, W., & Shafran, R. (2004). Cognitive behaviouralprocesses across psychological disorders: A transdiagnostic approach to research and treatment. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.