Hello again, it’s a been a good couple of weeks 🙂

This article is the first to be published about my new passion, which is judgement biases in anxiety and depression.  This paper is about probability bias, which is the tendency to think bad things are more likely to happen than good things.  We see this in people with anxiety, and in people with depression.

This article demonstrates that we also see the same bias in people who have weak attentional control, even if they’re not anxious or depressed.  That’s a bit surprising, but it reinforces the idea – which you’ll find a lot in the literature – that weak attentional control is a risk factor for emotional disorders.  This is because biases, like probability bias, are thought to play a role in the causation of emotional disorders, so anything which increases the chances of showing probability bias will probably also increase the chances of developing a disorder.  Stay tuned for more work on these topics …

Booth, R. W., & Sharma, D. (2019).  Attentional control and estimation of the probability of positive and negative events.  Cognition and Emotion.  Article accepted for publication.

Another article accepted, this time in the International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy.  This one is about attentional control, and whether it is linked to anxiety disorders.  We know poor attentional control is linked to anxiety, but we didn’t know whether it had a special connection to anxiety disorders.  In other words, we didn’t know whether there would be a measurable difference in attentional control between someone with the mildest diagnosable anxiety disorder, and someone with very severe but not-diagnosably-high anxiety.  Long story short, there isn’t.

Booth, R. W., & Tekeş, B. (2019).  Individual differences in anxiety and worry, not anxiety disorders, predict weakened executive control: Preliminary evidence.  International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 19, 337-344.

The article is now available, open access, from here