ORIGINAL ARTICLE Age Differences in Interpretation Bias in Community and Comorbid Depressed and Anxious Samples Dusanka Tadic 1 • Viviana M. Wuthrich 1 • Ronald M. Rapee 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract Negative interpretation biases have been asso- ciated with clinical depression and anxiety. However, ageing is associated with a positivity effect, in which older adults have a positive interpretation bias compared to younger adults. Few studies have compared interpretation biases in younger and older adults and fewer have made this comparison in clinical samples with anxiety and de- pression. This study conducted a signal detection analysis to assess differences in interpretation biases to ambiguous sentences in a control and a depressed and anxious sample of younger (18–30 years) and older (60? years) adults. Participants completed an interpretation bias task in which they were presented with unambiguous neutral sentences and ambiguous sentences related to threat. In addition, participants completed a recognition memory task to assess sensitivity and response biases to threat. Clinical anxiety and depression was associated with a negative interpreta- tion bias; however, there were no significant differences in sensitivity or response bias on the recognition memory task. Older age was associated with a positive interpreta- tion bias. Compared to younger adults, older adults showed a positive interpretation bias for ambiguous sentences, and greater sensitivity towards neutral sentences. In contrast, younger adults showed a negative interpretation bias, as well as a response bias towards threatening sentences. Keywords Interpretation bias Á Age-differences Á Positivity Á Response bias Á Depression Á Anxiety Introduction Biases in information processing have been identified as a vulnerability factor for the development of emotional dis- orders. Specifically, a negative interpretation bias, defined as the tendency to assign more negative meaning to ambiguous situations, has been associated with clinical anxiety and depression (Mathews and MacLeod 2005). Theories of de- pression propose that depressed people exhibit a systematic bias to interpret ambiguous stimuli in the environment in a more negative way due to the negative schemas they hold (e.g. loss, failure, rejection; Beck 1976). Similarly, infor- mation processing theories of anxiety propose that activa- tion of negative schemas (e.g. physical or psychological threat to one’s personal domain) lead to selectivity in pro- cessing threat cues and exaggerated anticipation of possible negative events in the future (Kendall and Ingram 1987). Empirical evidence shows that while non-anxious indi- viduals tend to favour positive or benign inferences about ambiguity, anxious individuals favour threatening infer- ences (Hirsch and Mathews 2000; MacLeod and Cohen 1993; Mathews and Mackintosh 2000). Similarly, compared to low dysphoric individuals high dysphoric individuals have been shown to resolve ambiguous scenarios in a more negative way (Berna et al. 2011), to recall a greater number of negative sentences and words, to identify negative facial expressions in faces that combined both positive and nega- tive emotions (Beevers et al. 2009), and negatively interpret ambiguous homophones (Mogg et al. 2006; Wenzlaff and Eisenberg 2001). These studies suggest that negative inter- pretation biases are associated with emotional dysfunction. & Dusanka Tadic v.duska@gmail.com Viviana M. Wuthrich Viviana.Wuthrich@mq.edu.au Ronald M. Rapee Ron.Rapee@mq.edu.au 1 Centre for Emotional Health, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia 123 Cogn Ther Res DOI 10.1007/s10608-015-9676-6