Cognitive biases, including biased orienting of attention to aversive cues, distorted expectation of the likelihood to encounter negative objects and biased interpretation of ambiguous information, constitute a prominent characteristic of psychopathology. Therefore, understanding the neurophysiological and cognitive mechanisms underlying cognitive biases is of theoretical and clinical importance. In this talk, I will present data evidence for attention, expectancy and perception biases among participants with arachnophobia and social anxiety disorder. In addition, I will discuss recent evidence for the potential diagnostic value of cognitive biases. Specifically, we have employed a battery of tasks assessing cognitive biases with machine-learning based analysis, in order to classify participants with anxiety vs. depression, two disorders that share many characteristics and show high comorbidity.

Finally, I will present data from two studies in which we aim to identify factors that modulate the efficacy of cognitive training in alleviating maladaptive symptoms of anxiety and depression. These findings will be discussed in the framework of disorder-specific vs. transdiagnostic approaches for psychopathology.