Modification of social interpretive bias in young adults

Participants will be undergraduate psychology students from the University of Otago, recruited through the Department of Psychology research participation programme. Participants will be asked to complete three surveys and four intervention sessions across 21 days. Each survey is expected to take approximately 15 minutes to complete and each intervention session is expected to take approximately 10 minutes to complete. On Day 1, participants will receive the initial invitation to complete the study and will be asked to complete the first survey and first intervention session. At the beginning of the survey, participants will be presented with the information sheet, as well as information about implied consent, continuation with the study implies consent for participation. Following completion of the first survey and intervention session, participants will be asked to complete an additional three 10-minute intervention sessions across one week (Days 3, 5, and 7). The third intervention session will be followed immediately by the post-intervention survey (Day 7). Participants will then be asked to complete the survey again two-weeks later for follow-up (Day 21). The intervention condition is a Cognitive Bias Modification-Intervention (CBM-I) task. The particular version of this task to be used in the current study is the Sentence Completion Task. This task was developed by Mathews and Mackintosh (2000) to influence the way people interpret ambiguous situations. The task consists of a series of descriptions, each of which are two sentences long. The first sentence is ambiguous, and the second sentence disambiguates the scenario (e.g., “You hear people talking about the speech you gave. They found it int_resting.”). One word in the second sentence is presented as a word fragment (e.g., int_resting) that participants are asked to complete. After the word fragment is completed, participants are presented with a yes/no comprehension question (e.g., “Did your speech go well?”) that they can correctly answer if they have correctly answered the word fragment. Participants then receive feedback about whether the comprehension question was answered correctly. For the proposed study, items have been adapted from those used by Cougle et al. (2019). There are 50 items in total, 25 of which are of a belonging affordance, and 25 of a burdensome affordance. Participants will be presented with a random selection of 10 belonging and 10 burdensome items in each of the four sessions. All surveys and intervention sessions will be administered online via the Qualtrics platform. Half of the participants will be randomised to the treatment condition where they will complete the Sentence Completion task as described above, and half will be randomised to the control condition in which they will read the ambiguous first sentence of each item and answer the comprehension questions but will not be presented with the disambiguating second sentence or feedback following the comprehension question. This allows for the investigation of the efficacy of the treatment for negative interpretive bias, with perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belonging as primary outcomes and suicidal thinking as a secondary outcome.