Inflexible interpretation in adolescence and its associations with depression, social anxiety, emotion regulation and emotion preferences

摘要: Depressive symptoms have for years been associated with biased interpretations of ambiguous information (see Everaert, Podina, & Koster, 2017). Recent work building upon this literature has demonstrated that inflexible interpretations, alongside biased ones, may contribute to depression (eg, Everaert, Bronstein, Cannon, & Joormann, 2018). This research implies that inflexible interpretations might also impact individual depressive symptoms above and beyond any effect of interpretation bias. Inflexibility in interpretation of social situations has not yet been examined in adolescence. Given that adolescence is a time of increased sensitivity to social situations (Rodman, Powers, & Somerville, 2017; Somerville, 2013), and that this increased sensitivity has been tied with higher risk for psychopathology (Rapee et al., 2019), examining inflexibility in the interpretation of social situations in adolescence is imperative. Therefore we developed a developmentally-sensitive version of the Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence (BADE; Everaert et al., 2018) task. Preliminary evidence from pilot studies on young adults shows that the developmentally-sensitive version of the BADE is similar to the adult BADE task. Specifically, in multiple regression models of previously collected data on young adults, greater NII and PII predict higher levels of depressive symptoms and dampening over and above NIB and PIB. Additionally, in a multiple regression model, NII predicted LSAS_Fear/avoidance and PII predicted LSAS_fear over and above NIB and PIB. Accordingly, the present study examines whether interpretation inflexibility (as well as interpretation biases …