Association between a directly translated cognitive measure of negative bias and self-reported psychiatric symptoms

Abstract Background Negative interpretation biases are thought to be core symptoms of mood and anxiety disorders. However, prior work using cognitive tasks to measure such biases is largely restricted to case-control group studies which cannot be used for inference about individuals without considerable additional validation. Moreover, very few measures are fully translational (i.e. can be used across animals and humans in treatment-development pipelines). This investigation aimed to produce the first measure of negative cognitive biases that is both a)translational and b)sensitive to individual differences, and then c)determine which specific self-reported psychiatric symptoms are related to bias. Methods N=1060(N=990 complete) participants performed a cognitive task of negative bias alongside psychiatric symptom questionnaires. We tested the hypothesis that individual levels of mood and anxiety disorder symptomatology would covary positively with negative bias on the cognitive task using a combination of computational modelling of behaviour, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM). Results Participants with higher depression symptoms(β=-0.16,p=0.017), who were older(β=-0.11,p=0.001) and had lower IQ(β=0.14,p Conclusions This measure, which uniquely spans both the clinical group-to-individual and preclinical animal-to-human generalizability gaps, can be used to measure individual differences in depression vulnerability for translational treatment-development pipelines.