Martijn van Teffelen

Chapter 6 128 vividly as possible on all sensory modalities with their eyes closed. This exercise prepared participants to imagine scenarios presented in the intervention as lively as possible. Each session consisted of two parts. In the first part, participants were presented with 38 scenarios of the Word-Sentence Association Paradigm (WSAP) (Beard & Amir, 2008). Here, participants were shown either a hostile (e.g., ‘rude’) or neutral (e.g., ‘unaware’) word, followed by an ambiguous sentence (e.g., ‘You are trying to concentrate, but someone is talking very loud’). Each ambiguous sentence was presented twice in a random order: once in combination with the hostile word and once in combination with the neutral word. Participants then had to indicate whether the word was related to the sentence by pressing ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Participants received positive feedback when they related neutral words to ambiguous sentences (i.e., a green ‘V’-sign accompanied by the text “Correct, the answer is yes/no”). Similarly, participants received negative feedback when they related hostile words to ambiguous sentences (i.e., “Incorrect, the answer should have been yes/no”). An example of the procedure is shown in the Appendix A. In the second part, participants were presented with 33 vignettes of the scenario training (Hawkins & Cougle, 2013; Mathews & Mackintosh, 2000). Here, participants were shown ambiguous sentences (e.g., “Someone near you laughs very loudly”). Then, participants had to complete a disambiguating word fragment (e.g., “This person is unaw_re of how loud he is”). After that, participants had to answer a comprehension question (e.g., “Is this person trying to annoy others?”) by pressing “yes” or “no.” Similar to the WSAP, participants received positive feedback when the comprehension question was answered in a benign way and negative feedback when the comprehension question was answered in a hostile way. For a graphical example, see the Appendix B. Active control training. The active control condition was similar to the CBM-I condition, except that participants were presented with only neutral words during the WSAP (e.g., “ball” and “concentrate”) and neutral scenarios (e.g., “Your friend is walking through the park”, “He sees a squi_el” and “Did your friend see a bird?”) during the scenario training. Materials Benign and hostile interpretation bias. Interpretation tendencies were measured with the Social Information Processing-Attribution and Emotional Response questionnaire (SIP-AEQ) (Coccaro et al., 2009). Participants were asked to read eight vignettes (e.g., “You tell a friend something personal and ask your friend not to discuss it with anyone else. However, a couple of weeks later, you find out that a lot of people know about it. You ask your friend why she/he told other people and your friend says: “Well, I don’t know, it just came up and I didn’t think it was a big deal.”), followed by four statements (e.g., “My friend wanted me to feel stupid for asking to keep my secret”, as an example of a hostile interpretation). Participants were then asked to indicate the likelihood of