Health-threatening interpretation of ambiguity early on: risk or protective factor? Comparing CFS/ME and healthy individuals

Abstract

Background: A cognitive account of the persistence of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) proposes biased interpretation may distort symptom perception and undermine recovery. Interpretation of somatic information that favours health-threatening meaning may lead to negative and maladaptive illness cognitions and prolonged suffering. The study aimed to measure an online interpretive bias in CFS/ME, the interpretations made at the moment of encounter of ambiguous information at an early stage of information processing. Methods: 33 CFS/ME and 33 healthy matched controls completed a lexical decision task that measured preferences in the interpretation of ambiguity. Findings: CFS/ME individuals did not have an interpretive bias towards health-threatening meaning following presentation of ambiguous information F (6, 384) = .662, p = .680, ηp2 = .010. Healthy participants showed a bias towards Illness prime threat compared with the neutral primes, t (32) = 2.54, p = .016. Discussion: The experiment showed an absence of interpretation biases in the early stages of information processing among CFS/ME individuals, but suggested that healthy individuals may be susceptible to the potentially threatening meaning of the ambiguous illness prime.