Negative cognitive biases, such as attention, interpretation, and memory biases, play an essential role in the onset, development and maintenance of emotional disorder and independence symptoms. According to the combined cognitive bias hypothesis, those cognitive biases do not operate in isolation, but rather influence and interact with each other and are considered to work on emotional disorders in a concert.
Several studies evident the correlation between those biases; however, only minimal studies focused on the causal effect between biases. In other words, it’s unclear whether attention, interpretation, and memory bias causally influence each other. Studying the potential causal link among biases is important.
It paves a better understanding of the underlying mechanism of emotional and independence disorders and could help develop multiple treatments targeting combined cognitive biases to intervene in the related symptoms. Therefore, we use a theoretically innovative approach (i.e., combined cognitive bias theory) and mixed methods (i.e., multiple paradigm and experimental settings) to further explore how biases interact with each other, and how they might influence emotional and independence disorder symptoms