Discussion
anxiety
The main purpose of the present study was to examine whether experimentally induced interpretation bias would affect biases in memory in Korean samples. In doing this, the present study used CBM scenarios that were auditory-specific and with a focus on social anxiety symptoms. The main results showed that interpretation biases can be induced, and induced interpretation biases resulted in training congruent state mood and memory biases on both free-recall memory and autobiographical memory. These results supported Hirsh and Clark’s [First, the negative group showed a significantly increased negative state mood (sad) compared with the positive group, whereas the positive group showed a significantly increased positive state mood (happy) compared with the negative group. These findings support hypothesis 1 and are in line with prior studies that showed that modification training of interpretation bias affects state mood [Second, the positive group revealed a positive interpretation bias in both the target and foil sentences, whereas the negative group did not show any difference. As such, hypothesis 2 was partially supported. That the positive group displayed positive interpretation bias in both target and foil sentences is consistent with prior studies [There was no effect of CBM-I training on interpretation bias in the negative group. This result is inconsistent with prior studies that showed that negative CBM-I training can induce negative interpretation bias in a single session [Third, we investigated whether modified interpretation bias could also affect biases in memory. Participants in positive group reported more positive intrusions than the negative group in free recall task, whereas negative group reported more negative intrusions than the positive group, which supports prior results [The limitations of present study and suggestions for further research are as follows. First, the CBM-I trainings in the present study were conducted only with female voices. Among the questions asking about social interaction anxiety [Second, we examined the effectiveness of CBM-I training in healthy participants for only one session and could not confirm whether the training effect lasted. Meta-analysis results have shown that training in quasi-clinical groups and increasing the number of sessions can improve the effectiveness of CBM-I [Third, individual differences in memory capacity could not be controlled. Memory capacity may have affected the recall rate of the recall task, and the ability to save the information needed to perform cognitive tasks in a short period of time as well as the functioning capacity to control and manipulate memory may have affected the performance in imagining while listening to scenarios in CBM-I training [Fourth, to verify the effectiveness of the positive CBM-I training program, we included a comparison group as the negative group, but not a neutral training control group or non-trained control group. So, it is difficult to conclude whether the differences between groups are due to the effects of positive or negative CBM-I training, or the differences in changes caused by both. Therefore, to prove that changes in interpretation and memory bias are inherent effects of positive CBM-I training, the effectiveness of CBM-I training should be verified more clearly by comparing with the results of control groups that receive placebo training, such as neutral interpretation training, or with non-trained groups.Finally, we acknowledge that the absence of a baseline assessment of interpretation bias is a limitation of our study. Therefore, we urge caution in interpreting the results regarding the effect of CBM-I training on interpretation bias. Despite the random assignment of participants to the positive and negative training groups, we cannot disregard the possibility that there might have been initial differences in positive and negative interpretation tendencies between the groups. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of CBM-I training on interpretation biases, future research should consider incorporating baseline measurements. This would enable a clearer assessment of the effectiveness of CBM-I interventions in shaping interpretation biases.Despite these limitations, present study has the following advantages. First, training scenarios were created focusing on social anxiety symptoms. Second, by verifying that a single session CBM-I training affects interpretation, subsequently ongoing and autobiographical memory, the present study provided partial support for the interaction hypothesis proposed by Hirsch and Clark [