Cognitive Biases and the Emotional Disorders

Four types of cognitive bias involving selective processing of emotion-relevant information are discussed vis-à-vis their relevance for understanding emotion-cognition interactions and for understanding the etiology and maintenance of the emotional disorders. Anxiety, but not depression, appears to be associated with an attentional bias for threatening material. Depression, but not anxiety, appears to be associated with a memory bias for negative mood-congruent material. Phobias, anxiety, and depression all appear to be associated with mood-congruent judgmental biases. Finally, selective associations in fear conditioning are a form of associative bias implicated in the origins of fears and phobias.