Such interpretation bias tests are not easy to administer and score. Other variants have not been submitted to basic scrutiny to determine whether they assess a bias relevant to dysphoria or depression (MacLeod et al. 2009). A more pragmatic measure for future use in clinical settings includes an ambiguous scenarios

test (AST) in which participants are simply required to rate a series of descriptions (e.g. Holmes and Mathews, 2005, Holmes et al., 2006 and Hoppitt et al., 2010). The initial version of the AST used recognition ratings and required a somewhat complex computation of a bias score (Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000). Replacing the recognition task with pleasantness ratings on a 9-point Likert scale simplified this (Holmes & Mathews, 2005). Further, to maximise impact, participants were encouraged to simulate the scenarios using mental imagery to resolve ambiguity (Holmes, Lang, & Shah 2009; Hoppitt et al. 2010). For example, GW3965 chemical structure one item read “You are watching the lottery results on TV. As the numbers are called you find out your result”. A positive interpretation would include winning and a negative interpretation, losing. Higher pleasantness ratings indicate a more positive interpretation bias. Since ASTs were initially developed for anxiety such a measure required modification to be valid in the context of depressed mood. Our goal in the two studies presented here was to develop an AST measure of interpretation

bias by adapting

the scenario Ribociclib content for depressed mood (AST-D1). In line with Holmes, Lang, & Shah (2009), explicit instructions to imagine the ambiguous situations were included. We predicted that compared to low dysphorics (i.e. people with low levels of depressed mood), high dysphorics (people with high levels of depressed mood) would have a more negative bias on the AST-D (Study 1) as indicated Rutecarpine by lower subjective pleasantness ratings. Further, we predicted that participants’ subjective ratings would be corroborated by independent raters’ judgments of written descriptions of the imagined scenarios (Study 2). A 24-item AST-D was derived from a brief pilot study of 55 scenarios (N = 53). The AST-D was then presented in a web-based format (N = 208). Participants were instructed to imagine the outcome of each of the ambiguous scenarios, and to rate the pleasantness for each. To check whether differences in imagination were influencing the results, measures of mental imagery (vividness for the AST-D items and the tendency to use mental imagery in everyday life) were included. We predicted that the pleasantness scores on the AST-D would be negatively correlated with Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) scores independent of the mental imagery measures. A pilot set of 55 items was derived from the 20-item AST used previously by Holmes and Mathews, 2005 and Holmes et al., 2006 by adding 35 further depression-relevant items.