Cognitive Bias Of High Negative Perfectionisits

Negative perfectionism is a stable personality.Numerous studies have found that perfectionism is related to multiple psychological disorders,and it has been affirmed as an important predisposing and perpetuating factor for such conditions as depression,anxiety,eating disorders and sleep disorders(Dry et al.,2015;Mehr & Adams,2016).Investigating the characteristics of high negative perfectionists in information processing not only leads to a better understanding of the perpetuating and maintaining mechanisms of high negative perfectionists,but also can assist in the clinical intervention work on high negative perfectionists.In addition,it has positive significance to prevent and reduce the occurrence of other psychological diseases.Cognitive bias refers to the selective processing bias to specific types of stimuli during information processing(Blanchette & Richards,2010),which can be divided into three types:attentional bias,memory bias and interpretative bias.These three types of cognitive biases represent the processing characteristics of processors in the information selection,memory and thinking stages,respectively.Will high negative perfectionists show cognitive bias of specific types of stimuli? What role does the cognitive bias play in the maintenance of negative perfectionism? These questions are to be explored in this research.Therefore,the present research was designed to explore the cognitive bias of high negative perfectionists and to establish a cognitive bias model of high negative perfectionists,thus providing a theoretical basis for future clinical intervention of high negative perfectionists.The empirical research consists of three parts.The attentional bias,memory bias and interpretative bias of high negative perfectionists in college students were discussed respectively.The first part explored the attentional bias of high negative perfectionists.One's selective processing of information is manifested in two aspects: "difficulty in suppressing information" and "over-excitement for information".Therefore,it is necessary to investigate attentional bias under the inhibition and activation paradigms respectively in order to comprehensively understand individual's attentional bias.The part consists of four experiments.In experiments 1a and 1b,the inhibitory paradigm was used to investigate attentional bias.The emotional stroop task was used to compare the attentional bias of high negative perfectionist(HNP)group(n=30)and low negative perfectionist(LNP)group(n=30)to different types of words in experiment 1a.The emotional stroop task was also used to compare the attentional bias of HNP group(n=30)and LNP group(n=30)to different types of images in experiment 1b.In experiments 2a and 2b,the activation paradigm was used to investigate attentional bias.The dot-probe task was used to compare the attentional bias of HNP group(n=31)and LNP group(n=30)to different types of words in experiment 2a.A naturalistic visual scanning approach was used to compare the attentional patterns of HNP group(n=39)and LNP group(n=34)to different types of images during a long time of stimulus presentation in experiment 2b.The results were as follows: the participants in HNP group did not show an attentional bias to negative words under inhibitory paradigm,but showed an overall attentional bias to the negative words related to perfectionism under activation paradigm,and the main component of attentional bias was facilitated attention.The participants in HNP group showed an attentional bias towards imperfect images under inhibitory paradigm,and they also showed an attentional bias towards imperfect images in initial attention orientation stage and maintenance stage under activation paradigm.However,when the stimulus images were presented for a long time(1000ms?2000ms),the participants in HNP group diverted their attention away from the imperfect pictures and began to pay more attention to the perfect pictures.These results indicated that in the initial stage of information processing,high negative perfectionists have the bias of information selection,but when the stimulus is presented for a long time,high negative perfectionists would use the emotion regulation strategies of avoidance to reduce the processing of imperfect information.The second part explored the memory bias of high negative perfectionists.Since memory bias was often influenced by the processing depth of stimulus encoding,the second part consists of two experiments to investigate the memory bias of individuals on the low and deep processing level,respectively.Experiment 3a compared the memory bias of HNP group(n=30)and LNP group(n=30)to different types of words at the low processing level.Experiment 3b compared the memory bias of HNP group(n=30)and LNP group(n=30)to different types of words at the deep processing level.The results were as follows: the participants in HNP group showed a memory bias for negative words at the low processing level while it didn't detect the memory bias for such words at the deep processing level.These results indicated that the processing bias of high negative perfectionists in the memory stage of information processing depends on the depth of encoding.The third part explored the interpretative bias of high negative perfectionists.The sentence complement task was used to compare the interpretive bias of HNP group(n=33)and LNP group(n=32)to emotionally ambiguous information related or unrelated to perfectionism in experiment 4.The results showed that the participants in HNP group had negative interpretative bias for emotionally ambiguous information both related to perfectionism and unrelated to perfectionism,which indicated that in the advanced information processing stage,high negative perfectionists also have cognitive bias in information processing.These results indicated that high negative perfectionists have negative cognitive bias in the information selection,memory and thinking stages,and the content of negative cognitive bias is not limited to perfection-relevant information.In different stages of information processing,the cognitive bias of high negative perfectionists is influenced by different factors.It is suggested that cognitive bias modification could be used to intervene high negative perfectionists in future clinical work.