Challenging Unhelpful Interpretations in Daily Life
4 questions to think about.
Posted May 26, 2022 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Negative interpretations of ambiguous situations can harm your mental health.
- Habits to interpret situations negatively can be improved through novel interventions.
- These interventions may help clinicians further improve their treatments.
Imagine the following situation as if it would happen to you right now:
The company you are working for needs to lay off many employees. One day, you are called in to see your boss. When you enter the room, your boss’s face looks tired.
What do you think is happening here? Is this situation beneficial to you? What may the outcome be? How do you feel about this situation?
People are required to interpret such situations to make sense of what is happening to them and to understand the implications for their own lives. When imagining this situation, you may have experienced thoughts such as “My boss needs me to leave the company.” You may have been less likely to think “My boss will tell me that he wants to keep me at the company.”
When people regularly come up with more negative and fewer positive thoughts to explain what is going on (i.e., interpretations), they have an interpretation bias. This means that they tend to reach more negative conclusions when faced with ambiguous or unclear situations such as the one in the example.
Something to Worry About?
How people resolve situations may have an impact on how they feel about those situations. Research shows that having more negative than positive interpretations when facing daily life situations is related to symptoms of depression now and in the future.1,2 Researchers and clinicians think that an interpretation bias may increase someone’s risk of developing a mental health condition. This is why such interpretation tendencies are an important target in many common treatments for depression such as cognitive-behavioral therapies.
But, if you recognize yourself in the example above, should you worry? The answer is no. Though people’s thoughts may influence how they feel, they do not always lead to mental health issues, and there are techniques to change these negative tendencies.
Fortunately, people have the capacity to change how they think and interpret situations in their daily life. Changing how people think or interpret situations has an impact on their emotional experiences. Cognitive-behavioral therapies often provide techniques to learn how to rethink situations. Such techniques are also useful to people without symptoms of depression, but who regularly have negative thoughts when they go about their daily lives.
What to Do? The 4-Questions Technique
One of the techniques used in cognitive-behavioral therapy is the four-questions technique. This technique encourages someone to challenge or rethink unhelpful thoughts. The four questions are:
- Why do you think this thought is correct? What is the evidence for it?
- Do you recognize the thought as some type of thinking bias? Examples are "jumping to conclusions," which means that you are making negative interpretations even though there are no facts that support your conclusion, or "all-or-nothing thinking," which means that you see things in black-and-white categories (e.g., as a success or failure).3
- What are the consequences of the thought?
- What are possible alternative thoughts to understand the situation?
Now think about the example above. Take a minute to answer the four questions if you had negative thoughts to explain the situation described in the example.
Ready?
Applied to the example, you may wonder:
- "Is there evidence that I'm going to be fired?"
- "Am I exaggerating and reaching rushed conclusions?"
- "If I think I will be fired soon, how will I behave at work? How is it going to impact my mood?"
- "Maybe my boss just wants to talk to me about something else and s/he looks tired because s/he had a problem at home.”
This popular technique is now being used in a novel online intervention program, called relearning how to think.4 Relearning how to think aims to help people in interpreting ambiguous situations in a less negative and more positive manner.
Recent research showed that the relearning how to think program had various beneficial effects for its users. After completing the program, users experienced fewer negative interpretations and depression symptoms. This research finding is important because relearning how to think is a brief and low-cost intervention that can be made widely accessible to help many people with challenging their unhelpful thoughts. In that way, relearning how to think may help prevent depressive symptoms from developing.
This blog post was written by Inés Nieto, MA, and Jonas Everaert, Ph.D.
References
[1] Everaert, J., Cocia, I., & Koster, E.H.W. (2017). A comprehensive meta-analysis of interpretation biases in depression. Clinical Psychology Review, 58,33-48. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2017.09.005.
[2] Nieto, I., Robles, E., & Vazquez, C. (2020). Self-reported cognitive biases in depression: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 82, Article 101934. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101934
[3] The reader can consult Table 3-1. Definitions of Cognitive Distortions in the book Feeling good by David Burns (1980). Penguin Books: New York.
[4] Nieto, I., & Vazquez, C. (2021). Disentangling the mediating role of modifying interpretation bias on emotional distress using a novel cognitive bias modification program. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 83, 102459.