Sonia J Bishop

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology

Individuals prone to anxiety and depression often report beliefs and make judgements about themselves that are more negative than those reported by others. We use computational modeling of a richly naturalistic task to disentangle the role of negative priors versus negatively biased belief updating and to investigate their association with differen...

Using a contingency volatility manipulation, we tested the hypothesis that difficulty adapting probabilistic decision-making to second-order uncertainty might reflect a core deficit that cuts across anxiety and depression and holds regardless of whether outcomes are aversive or involve reward gain or loss. We used bifactor modeling of internalizing...

Patients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) show between-group comorbidity and symptom overlap, and within-group heterogeneity. Resting state functional connectivity might provide an alternate, biologically informed means by which to stratify patients with GAD or MDD. Resting state functional magnetic resona...

In everyday life, the outcomes of our actions are rarely certain. Further, we often lack the information needed to precisely estimate the probability and value of potential outcomes as well as how much effort will be required by the courses of action under consideration. Under such conditions of uncertainty, individual differences in the estimation...

Background Highly co-morbid mood and anxiety disorders are associated with aberrant fronto-limbic signalling during emotional processing. Animal models suggest that hypoactive prefrontal cortex weakens top-down control of limbic structures, causing heightened limbic and behavioural reactivity to negative information. Here we tested for this causal...

Recruitment of 'top-down' frontal attentional mechanisms is held to support detection of changes in task-relevant stimuli. Fluctuations in intrinsic frontal activity have been shown to impact task performance more generally. Meanwhile, the amygdala has been implicated in 'bottom-up' attentional capture by threat. Here, twenty-two adult human partic...

Sustained anxiety about potential future negative events is an important feature of anxiety disorders. In this study, we used a novel anticipation of shock paradigm to investigate individual differences in functional connectivity during prolonged threat of shock. We examined the correlates of between-participant differences in trait anxious affect...

Anxious individuals have a greater tendency to categorize faces with ambiguous emotional expressions as fearful (Richards et al., 2002). These behavioral findings might reflect anxiety-related biases in stimulus representation within the human amygdala. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with a continuous adaptation...

Statistical regularities in the causal structure of the environment enable us to predict the probable outcomes of our actions. Environments differ in the extent to which action-outcome contingencies are stable or volatile. Difficulty in being able to use this information to optimally update outcome predictions might contribute to the decision-makin...

Anxiety is associated with increased attentional capture by threat. Previous studies have used simultaneous or briefly separated (<1 s) presentation of threat distractors and target stimuli. Here, we tested the hypothesis that high trait anxious participants would show a longer time window within which distractors cause disruption to subsequent tas...

Resting state fMRI may help identify markers of risk for affective disorder. Given the comorbidity of anxiety and depressive disorders and the heterogeneity of these disorders as defined by DSM, an important challenge is to identify alterations in resting state brain connectivity uniquely associated with distinct profiles of negative affect. The cu...

Much remains unknown regarding the relationship between anxiety, worry, sustained attention, and frontal function. Here, we addressed this using a sustained attention task adapted for functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants responded to presentation of simple stimuli, withholding responses to an infrequent "No Go" stimulus. Dorsolateral...

Investigations of fear conditioning in rodents and humans have illuminated the neural mechanisms underlying cued and contextual fear. A critical question is how personality dimensions such as trait anxiety act through these mechanisms to confer vulnerability to anxiety disorders, and whether humans' ability to overcome acquired fears depends on reg...

Previous work has shown that trait anxiety is associated with interpretative biases in the perception of facial expressions, specifically an increased tendency to judge ambiguous facial expressions as fearful. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and both univariate and multivariate analysis techniques, we investigated the neural correlates...

Many neurocognitive models of anxiety emphasize the importance of a hyper-responsive threat-detection system centered on the amygdala, with recent accounts incorporating a role for prefrontal mechanisms in regulating attention to threat. Here we investigated whether trait anxiety is associated with a much broader dysregulation of attentional contro...

We investigated whether the val(158)met functional polymorphism of catechol-o-methyltransferase influenced age-related changes in grey matter density and volume, both in healthy individuals (n=80, ages 18-79) and those with Parkinson's disease (n=50). Global grey matter volumes and voxelwise estimates of grey matter volume and density were determin...

Reports an error in "Goal neglect and Spearman's g: Competing parts of a complex task" by John Duncan, Alice Parr, Alexandra Woolgar, Russell Thompson, Peter Bright, Sally Cox, Sonia Bishop and Ian Nimmo-Smith (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2008[Feb], Vol 137[1], 131-148). The DOI for the supplemental materials was printed incorrectl...

Fluid intelligence (g(f)) influences performance across many cognitive domains. It is affected by both genetic and environmental factors. Tasks tapping g(f) activate a network of brain regions including the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), the presupplementary motor area/anterior cingulate cortex (pre-SMA/ACC), and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS)....

Biased competition models of selective attention suggest that attentional competition is influenced both by bottom-up sensory mechanisms sensitive to stimulus salience and top-down control mechanisms that support the processing of task-relevant stimuli. This provides a framework for investigating the neural mechanisms underlying selective attention...

In goal neglect, a person ignores some task requirement though being able to describe it. Goal neglect is closely related to general intelligence or C. Spearman's (1904) g (J. Duncan, H. Emslie, P. Williams, R. Johnson, & C. Freer, 1996). The authors tested the role of task complexity in neglect and the hypothesis that different task components in...

Anxiety can be hugely disruptive to everyday life. Anxious individuals show increased attentional capture by potential signs of danger, and interpret expressions, comments and events in a negative manner. These cognitive biases have been widely explored in human anxiety research. By contrast, animal models have focused upon the mechanisms underlyin...

Debate continues as to the automaticity of the amygdala's response to threat. Accounts taking a strong automaticity line suggest that the amygdala's response to threat is both involuntary and independent of attentional resources. Building on these accounts, prominent models have suggested that anxiety modulates the output of an amygdala-based preat...

Early studies of genetic effects on brain activity have been conducted to investigate primarily either the influence of polymorphisms in dopaminergic genes, especially the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene, on prefrontal cognitive processes such as working memory, or that of polymorphisms in the serotonin transporter gene on the amygdala res...

Findings from fear-conditioning studies in rats and functional neuroimaging with human volunteers have led to the suggestion that the amygdala is involved in the preattentive detection of threat-related stimuli. However, some neuroimaging findings point to attentional modulation of the amygdala response. The clinical-cognitive literature suggests t...

Cognitive theories of depression emphasise a vicious circle linking depressed mood and biased recall towards negative information. In line with this, depressed adults show selectively enhanced recall for negative information. This recall bias is held to be mediated by increased accessibility of negative self-referent schemas formed as a result of a...

Threat-related stimuli are strong competitors for attention, particularly in anxious individuals. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with healthy human volunteers to study how the processing of threat-related distractors is controlled and whether this alters as anxiety levels increase. Our work builds upon prior analyses of the co...

Genomic research has produced an abundance of new candidate targets that remain to be validated as potential treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders. Functional neuroimaging, meanwhile, has provided detailed new insights into the neural circuits involved in emotional and cognitive control. At the growing interface between these independent lines...

Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to examine two questions: (i) which structures of the intact human brain change their activity with the direction of attention to left or right visual field; and (ii) how does activity in these structures, and in parietal cortex in particular, depend on the frequency of attentional shifts? Subjects were r...

Grammatical specific language impairment (G-SLI) has been proposed as a distinct subtype of language impairment. We assessed a large sample of twins between the ages of 7 and 13 years on language comprehension tests sensitive to G-SLI. The sample included 37 same-sex twin pairs selected for the presence of language impairment (LI) in one or both tw...

Fourteen twin pairs, aged 8 to 10 years, were tested 3 times over 12 months; they included 11 children with language impairment (LI), 11 control children matched on nonverbal ability and age, and 6 co-twins who did not meet criteria for LI or control status. Thresholds were estimated for detecting a brief backward-masked tone (BM), detection of fre...

Fourteen twin pairs, aged 8 to 10 years, were tested 3 times over 12 months; they included 11 children with language impairment (LI), 11 control children matched on nonverbal ability and age, and 6 co-twins who did not meet criteria for LI or control status. Thresholds were estimated for detecting a brief backward-masked tone (BM), detection of fre...

This study investigated the heritability of auditory processing impairment, as assessed by Tallal's Auditory Repetition Test (ART). The sample consisted of 37 same-sex twin pairs who had previously been selected because one or both twins met criteria for language impairment (LI) and 104 same-sex twin pairs in the same age range (7 to 13 years) from...

Retrospective parental report of earlier "twin language" was obtained for two groups of twins. Sample G consisted of 94 twin pairs between the ages of 7 and 13 years recruited through the school system as a general population sample. Sample L consisted of 82 twin pairs between the ages of 7 and 13 years who had been recruited for a genetic study; o...

Retrospective parental report of earlier "twin language" was obtained for two groups of twins. Sample G consisted of 94 twin pairs between the ages of 7 and 13 years recruited through the school system as a general population sample. Sample L consisted of 82 twin pairs between the ages of 7 and 13 years who had been recruited for a genetic study; o...

Threat-related stimuli are strong competitors for attention, particularly in anxious individuals. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with healthy human volunteers to study how the processing of threat-related distractors is controlled and whether this alters as anxiety levels increase. Our work builds upon prior analyses of the co...