Attention and Interpretation biases in Paranoid Psychosis
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Attention and Interpretation biases in Paranoid Psychosis. An fMRI investigation.
IRAS ID
129640
Contact name
Camellia Al Ibrahim
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Research summary
The selective processing of information is empirically implicated in the cause and maintenance of many psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety disorders showing that biases in attention and interpretation are common features among them. Investigating those biases has helped developing therapeutic approaches to these disorders as in the case of cognitive bias modification.
However, cognitive biases in psychotic disorders have been under investigated compared to emotional disorders despite their aetiological properties in other disorders.
This research aims to investigate brain networks associated with attention and interpretation biases in paranoid psychosis by implementing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to four experimental behavioral tasks sensitive to psychosis. These tasks are the emotional stroop task, the attentional probe task, the similarity ratings task and the scrambled sentences.
The purpose of our investigation is to examine brain networks associated with cognitive biases in paranoid psychosis by comparing activations in patients with schizophrenia with and without significant paranoid symptoms and compare them to healthy controls.
Results of this study will contribute to our understanding of biased information processing in paranoid psychosis, and help advancing the development and evaluation of therapeutic interventions for psychotic symptoms.REC name
London - Brent Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/LO/1187
Date of REC Opinion
7 Oct 2013
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion