Significance statement
depression, anxiety
DISORDERS
Cognitive biases (e.g., attention and interpretation biases) are conceptualized as central mechanisms for the onset and maintenance of emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety. Cognitive models have posited that these biases emerge under stressful situations, impairing peoples’ ability to regulate negative emotions, ultimately leading to the appearance of emotional symptoms. Given the current worldwide prevalence of emotional disorders and emotion dysregulation problems, there is a clear need for new approaches targeting these cognitive biases at a broad and accessible scale.
In the present two proof-of-principle studies, we adapted a well-established cognitive biases modification paradigm (CBM) into a novel smartphone app (OCAT) for training participants’ attention and interpretation biases during two different naturalistic stressful situations. In Study 1, undergraduate students completed the OCAT training (10 session per day) when they were facing their final examination period. In Study 2, people from the community completed the same training during the occurrence of a very restrictive COVID-19 lockdown. Overall, these studies showed the efficacy of the OCAT app to modify both attention and interpretation biases, as well as transfer effects to improve emotion regulation and reduce emotional symptoms.These findings shed light regarding the causal role of cognitive biases on emotion regulation and emotional symptoms. Moreover, provide further encouragement for the further development and dissemination of CBM paradigms that can be applied in online formats.
