It is pretty much common thinking in the mental health world that those with anxiety and/or depression can get into a perpetual cycle of negative thinking. This negative thinking only makes the anxiety or depression worse, but reinforcing itself over and over. An example: say a young woman is very anxious about a business meeting coming up where she has to present information. She worries about this so much that she starts to envision multiple ways she can fail. When giving the presentation one of her co-workers yawns. She assume her presentation is going horrible and becomes very jittery and starts paying attention to the way people are responding to her rather than her information. She interprets every action negatively, and ends up giving a horrible presentation.
What the woman did not know is that her co-worker yawned because he was up all night with a sick child. That single misinterpretation, along with all of the previous anxiety and negative thinking, created the situation she was in.
Knowing how this works, researchers have been trying to find ways to help people not interpret ambiguous situations negatively. Since anxiety often starts at a young age, some researchers at Oxford University decided to see if they could alter the negative style of thinking in teenagers through tasks though would encourage positive interpretations of certain situations.
Knowing how this works, researchers have been trying to find ways to help people not interpret ambiguous situations negatively. Since anxiety often starts at a young age, some researchers at Oxford University decided to see if they could alter the negative style of thinking in teenagers through tasks though would encourage positive interpretations of certain situations.
Interestingly enough, there were positive findings in this initial research, which is published in the journal Child Psychiatry and Human Development. This was limited research, and early results, but there is a lot of potential. Basically, what they found is through some basic computer generated training tasks they were able to alter the way the teens were interpreting the ambiguous situations, choosing more positive explanations than negative.
The researchers hope that if they can help teens positively interpret these situations it will lead to less anxiety driven, negative adults.