A Intervention Study For Depressed Individual Interpretation Bias Of Ambiguous Facial Expressions

Cognition is an important way of emotional management,how individuals interpret ambiguous events depends on their tendency to understand positive or negative information.As a mood disorder,Depression lacks of normal regulation of emotions,and also shows more negative bias in the ambiguous interpretation.In recent years,more and more researchers in the West have begun to pay attention to the cognitive processing characteristics of depression groups.Many studies have confirmed the prevalence of interpretation bias in depression groups.Depression Individual’s interpretation of ambiguous expression not only affects self-cognitive activities,but also affects the individual’s social communication.There are few domestic researches on the interpretation bias of depression,as well as the recognition of ambiguous emotions.This study focuses on the interpretation bias of the individuals with depressive symptoms to ambiguous expression stimuli,and intervenes the interpretation bias of individuals with depressive symptoms by two methods of positive priming-positive assessment style and positive mental imagery.Objective:(1)To explore the interpretation bias of the individual with depressive symptoms to the stimulus of ambiguous faces.(2)To investigate the effect of positive priming on the interpretation bias of the individual with depressive symptoms.(3)To investigate the effect of positive psychological image training on the interpretation bias of the individual with depressive symptoms.Methods: In the first study,This experiment aims to investigate the interpretation bias of the individual with depressive symptoms to ambiguous facial expressions.40participants(18 females)were selected as the depressive tendency group by SDS(Self-Rating Depression Scale).The control group,a non-depressive tendency group of 40 participants(21 females),the experimental materials were mixed expression pictures synthesized from the happy expression to the sad expression by using software “Morpher 3.1”,all participants completed the ambiguous facial expression discrimination task.In the second study,Based on the first experiment,the two groups of participants were randomly assigned to the positive evaluation group(positive priming)and the negative evaluation group,and they repeated the ambiguous facial expression discrimination task.The experiment adopts pre-test and post-test contrast by the pairwise T test and three-factor repeated measures analysis of variance toanalyze the data.In the third study,40 participants of the depressive tendency group completed the first ambiguous facial expression discrimination task,and then they were randomly assigned to the positive mental imagery training group and the negative mental imagery training group and control group to complete the second discrimination task,the results adopts pre-test and post-test contrast by using two-factor repeated measures analysis of variance to analyze the data.Results:(1)Compared with the control group,the depression group was more likely to judge the ambiguous expression as sadness,that is,the interpretation of the ambiguous expression was negative.(2)In the second discrimination task,the individuals with depressive symptoms of the positive evaluation group,times of judging as negative significantly reduced,that is,positive evaluation can effectively reduce the negative interpretation bias.(3)For the participants of the positive psychological image training group,there was a significantly difference in times of judging as negative between the first and the second discrimination task,so positive images can reduce the negative interpretation bias of individuals with depressive symptoms.Conclusions:(1)There are negative interpretation biases when individuals with depressive symptoms discriminate ambiguous expressions.(2)Positive assessment style can reduce the negative interpretation bias of individuals with depressive symptoms in ambiguous expressions discrimination,while the negative one will increase the negative interpretation bias.(3)Positive psychological imagery can reduce the negative interpretation bias of individuals with depressive symptoms in ambiguous expressions discrimination,while the negative one will increase the negative interpretation bias.