"On the back of the weary and ever more negative interpretations of my [interview with Xfm]," Smith wrote on the Cure's website, "I will try to explain a very simple chain of events as clearly and succinctly as I can, given … constraints like not wanting to name too many names or point too many fingers".
However, socially anxious individuals made more negative interpretations of details included in the vignettes than nonanxious individuals, although unlike [3]Brendle and Wenzel (2004), they did not demonstrate the tendency to make less positive interpretations.
Following threat imagery, participants reported the speech preparation task to be significantly more stressful and threatening, and experienced lower levels of confidence and more negative interpretations of their anxiety symptoms compared with the challenge and neutral imagery conditions.
Children who heard the training material spoken aloud (spoken presentation) made more negative interpretations of ambiguous social events, and solved fewer difficult anagrams posttraining compared to pretraining.
On a shortened version of the task patients with bipolar disorder reported significantly fewer positive interpretations of the homographs and a trend towards significantly more negative interpretations compared to healthy volunteers.
Results: For the negative training, children who heard the training material spoken aloud (spoken presentation) made more negative interpretations of ambiguous social events, compared to children who read the training material (written presentation).
Finally, medicated depressed patients are more negative in their interpretation of ambiguous words (Mogg et al. 2006) and ambiguous situations (Nunn et al. 1997) than are healthy participants.
That is, participants in the negative training group more frequently chose negative interpretations, whereas participants in the positive training group more often endorsed positive interpretations.
Research has suggested that individuals high in IU may interpret ambiguous information in a more threatening manner, suggesting a negative interpretation bias for uncertain information.
But the more time we spend focusing on how to avoid negative events, "the more we train our brains to seek out the negative interpretation of a situation first and the positive second," he said.
