Abstract
Interpretation bias, or the threatening appraisal of ambiguous information, has been linked to anxiety disorder. Interpretation bias has been demonstrated for visual judgments (e.g., categorizing emotionally ambiguous facial expressions as more negative than they are), especially among anxious adult observers. Interpretation bias has also been demonstrated for linguistic judgments (e.g., evaluating ambiguous sentences as having a threatening meaning). Yet it is unclear how these separate components of bias might be associated and how they may manifest across development. We examined visual and linguistic interpretation biases in youth and emerging adults with (n = 44) and without (n = 40) anxiety disorder. To assess visual interpretation bias, observers were tasked with discriminating between happy and angry expressions of varied expression intensity on briefly presented faces. In the linguistic interpretation bias task, a word (threatening or neutral) was briefly presented followed by an ambiguous sentence, and observers reported if the word and sentence were related or not. We found strong evidence of negative interpretation bias in both the visual and linguistic tasks. Moreover, visual and linguistic biases were correlated with each other and with anxiety. Compared to non-anxious participants, those with anxiety demonstrated stronger biases, and linguistic bias was especially predictive of anxiety symptoms and diagnosis. Age did not moderate these relationships. This work suggests that a shared mechanism may bias both visual and linguistic judgments of clinically anxious youth and emerging adults.