Psychosomatic interventions: retraining Interpretation bias in fatigue
Additional information
Type of assignment: BSc. thesis
Internal/external: …
How many students?
Supervision: In (sub)groups
Includes data collection? Yes
Type of research: Quantitative empirical
Number of ECTS? 15 ECTS
Research assignment
A growing body of research shows that automatic and unconscious mental processes, so-called cognitive biases, play a causal role in health-related behaviors (healthy food, alcohol abuse), in somatic disease symptoms like chronic fatigue, and in mental health disorders. Traditional psychosocial interventions, however, do not target these cognitive biases. Computer-mediated techniques, Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM), have recently emerged that can correct these maladaptive biases with simple repetitive association tasks.
CBM techniques have been developed for different cognitive biases related to fatigue, including attentional bias (Att-CBM), self-identity bias (SI-CBM; Geerts 2023; Wolbers 2021), and interpretation bias (CBM-I). Evidence of CBM-I effectiveness is scarce, and within the domain of chronic fatigue in particular.
In this thesis project, we will work with an existing CBM-I technique, targeting biased interpretations of ambiguous cues (based on work by Hughes, Sharpe, and Mathews, see refs below). This is built in the TIIM app, powered by the BMS Lab. We will conduct a pilot-experiment (optionally with a non-treatment control group, and an active CBM group), exposing the experimental condition to a few daily smartphone-delivered CBM-I sessions.
Main outcome measure will be the change in interpretation bias, which will be measured with 2 different tests:
- An Ambiguous Scenario Task (already available for this project, but that needs to be revised, based on Hughes et al.), and
- Scrambled Sentence Task (Duken et al. 2024), to be developed within this project.
Each participating student will add one or two additional variables that may be relevant.
The general research aims are:
• Is CBM-I effective in correcting the fatigue interpretation bias?
Some additional research questions for individual thesis topics include:
• Is CBM-I effective in improving behavioral outcomes (all-or-nothing behavior, procrastination, physical activity)?
• Is CBM-I effective in improving health-related outcomes (like self-reported fatigue, vitality, mental health or quality of life measures)?
• Are CBM-I effects dependent on other characteristics (moderators)?
• Do both measures of I-bias show good psychometric properties?
References
Jones & Sharpe, 2017
Leung et al., 2022
Kakoschke et al., 2017