Is your mind biased to see the positive or the negative in life? Cognitive Bias Modification is a fun and interesting new self-therapy that helps train your mind to focus more on the positive stimuli in your daily environment.
Is your mind biased to see the positive or the negative in your environment?
For example, individuals with social anxiety have been shown to be more sensitive to negative faces and negative feedback they get from others. When they walk away from a social interaction, they are more likely to remember the negative comments and negative feedback than the positives from the social experience.
This negativity biases only reinforces a negative self-perception and increased feelings of anxiety and depression.
Cognitive bias modification (CBM) is a new technique that teaches your mind to shift your attention and focus toward more positive stimuli in your environment through a computerized training program.
The basic idea is to present both “positive stimuli” and “negative stimuli” to the participant, and they must scan the screen looking for the positive stimuli.
In one version of this technique designed to treat anxiety, participants are asked to spot the “happy face” among a bunch of “sad faces.” With practice, your mind gradually starts gravitating more toward the “happy faces.”
Here’s an example…
How quickly can you find the “happy face” in the image below?
Scan the image above and look for the smiling face. Did you find it?
In this CBM exercise, you continue to be presented with different grids of faces like the one above, and you have to click on the “happy face” as soon as you find it. Again, this type of attention training is designed to get you to focus more on the positive stimuli and less on the negative.
You can learn more about the main version of this exercise here, which was created by social psychologists at McGill University who have found a lot of positive results using this exact technique, including one study that found CBM to reduce social anxiety and social phobia, and another study that found CBM can reduce implicit feelings of social rejection.
Unfortunately, there used to be a free mobile version of this exercise called “PsychMeUp!” but it doesn’t seem to be available anymore.
However, you can easily create your own cognitive behavioral modification exercise by simply doing a Google image search for “human faces” and then scrolling through identifying all the happy faces you can find.
Keep scrolling and every time you see a happy face, say to yourself in your head “happy face” and then continue scrolling and scanning. You can also try measuring your results by setting a timer for 2 minutes and counting how many happy faces you can find within that time span.
It’s not as structured as the training app, but it does play off the exact same mechanism.
In addition to retraining your focus, this exercise may also create a type of emotional contagion effect. Emotions can often spread from one person to the next – and we are particularly sensitive to faces – so the more your mind is trained to see positive faces, the more your mind is going to mirror those positive emotions and positive feedback that is being communicated to you.
There are other interesting applications for cognitive bias modification that are being explored.
Another study tested a cognitive training program called “FoodT” that is designed to get people to click on healthy foods while ignoring unhealthy foods.
They found that participants who used the program ate less junk food and lost weight over the course of a month. You can try out a free version of this exercise here – it is recommended you do it once per day for 4 consecutive days (and to do it while hungry to maximize its effects).
You can also expand off of this exercise by doing a Google image search for “food” and then identifying how many healthy foods you can find within a 2 minute span (while ignoring the unhealthy foods).
The whole point of cognitive bias modification is to change the automatic connections your brain makes with certain stimuli.
So instead of automatically thinking, “Cookies – yum!” you start thinking “Cookies – no! Salad – yum!”
Of course this isn’t a magical fix, but it is one tool of many to help change your thoughts and behaviors. Cognitive bias modification is just one aspect of the broader range of tools found in cognitive-behavioral therapy.
In theory, you can use cognitive bias modification to change any type of cognitive bias you have. It’s simply training your brain to make new associations with the stimuli in your environment.
You can train your brain to think in new ways with practice – neuroplasticity is real and it’s always unfolding in the brain as we learn new things.
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