Cognitive Biases in Health and Psychiatric Disorders: Neurophysiological Foundations

Cognitive Biases in Health and Psychiatric Disorders: Neurophysiological Foundations focuses on the neurophysiological basis of biases in attention, interpretation, expectancy and memory. Each chapter includes a review of each specific bias, including both positive and negative information in both healthy individuals and psychiatric populations. This book provides readers with major theories, methods used in investigating biases, brain regions associated with the related bias, and autonomic responses to specific biases. Its end goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of the neural, autonomic and cognitive mechanisms related to processing biases.

A comprehensive reference to neural, autonomic, and cognitive mechanisms related to processing biases

Tatjana Aue is an Assistant Professor of Biological and Social Emotion Psychology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She is an associate editor with BMC Psychiatry (Section Stress and Anxiety). Tatjana’s work addresses cognitive, social, motivational, and physiological components of emotional experiences. She is particularly interested in the neurophysiological signatures of cognitive biases in expectancies and attention and in mutual influences between these biases – both in the positive (e.g., optimism) and in the negative (e.g., fear and phobia) domains. Additional topics investigated comprise social interactions, social identification, and empathy. With her team, she combines a multitude of methods in their research, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), peripheral physiology (e.g., electrocardiography, impedance cardiography, electromyography, plethysmography), and eye tracking.

Hadas Okon-Singer is a tenured Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) of Neurocognitive Emotion Psychology at the University of Haifa, Israel, and head of the Department for Cognitive Sciences. She served as associate editor in Cognition and Emotion between 2013 and 2016. Hadas’ research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms that mediate cognition-emotion interactions and the neural pathways underlying these interactions in health and disease. Together with her group, she combines behavioral assessments of reaction time and performance, autonomic measurement of heart rate and blood pressure reactions, EEG and fMRI recordings, personality questionnaires, and state-of-the-art analysis methods. Her work aims at understanding the interaction between different factors that modulate human reactions to aversive situations, focusing on attention systems and personality differences in traits, tendencies, and neural architecture. Research projects at the lab examine differences in information processing biases between anxious and depressed individuals, judgmental biases following empathy to pain, biased attention to threat cues, perception biases in social anxiety, attention biases to threat and reward cues among individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and blood pressure reactions to emotional cues.