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Research Article: A New Experimental Design to Examine Cognitive Biases for Gastrointestinal Related Stimuli in Children and Adolescents

Date Published: 2023-08-01

Abstract:
Cognitive biases toward disorder-specific stimuli are suggested as crucial to the development and maintenance of symptoms in adults with functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGID). Functional abdominal pain disorders (FAPD), a subtype of FGID, are common in children and adolescents, but the influence of cognitive biases is sparsely examined. This study aimed to (1) develop a new experimental design for assessing cognitive biases toward gastrointestinal stimuli in children and adolescents (aged 8 to 17 years) and (2) derive comparative data on bias toward gastrointestinal stimuli using a healthy “normative” sample. The online experimental design–BY-GIS (Bias in Youth toward GastroIntestinal-related Stimuli)—includes a word task and a picture task. Stimuli in both tasks are related to general and gastrointestinal symptoms, and the design includes three phases: (1) encoding, (2) free recall, and (3) recognition. Data were collected between April 2022 and April 2023 from 96 healthy participants (Mage = 12.32, 47.92% female). Adolescents were significantly better at recalling words than children (p = 0.03), whereas there were no significant gender or age differences with regard to recalling pictures (p > 0.05). Across age and gender, participants performed above chance level in the recognition phases of both tasks. The results support that the design is suitable within the age span.

Introduction:
Cognitive biases refer to abnormalities in attention to, interpretation of, and memory of specific stimuli, for instance, showing selective attention to negative information [1]. These biases are suggested to influence the development, maintenance, and recurrence of symptoms in various disorders such as anxiety, depression, and functional disorders (FD) [1,2,3]. The latter is an umbrella term for disorders characterized by certain patterns of somatic symptoms that cannot be explained by a well-defined organic or…

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