Martijn van Teffelen

Chapter 4 78 Imagery Cognitive Restructuring. The I-CR condition was overall identical to the CR condition with a few notable differences. First, psychoeducation focused on the role of mental images in hostility instead of cognitions. Second, instead of filling in a thought diary, an imagery interview was conducted in which participants were asked to form a mental image from the autobiographical event with their eyes closed as if it was happening now, following Hackmann et al. (2000). Then, participants were asked to translate their hostile cognition (e.g., “He bumped in to me on purpose”) into a mental image that represented the affective value of this cognition as good as possible (e.g., “A cartoonish image of a man with an angry red face who is towering high above me, pointing and spitting when he shouts at me”). Finally, the helpful thought (e.g., “He didn’t see me because he was in a hurry”) and accompanying feelings were then again transformed/represented into another –more helpful- mental image (e.g., “A picture of a smelly running man, with sweat pearls on his forehead, stains below his armpits with an anxious expression”). Active Control Condition. The AC condition was as identical to the I-CR and CR conditions as possible with several important differences aimed to elicit as little therapeutic effect as possible. First, during psychoeducation, participants received a general description of psychotherapy. Second, during the bogus intervention therapists asked as many questions about the situation as possible, actively refraining from insight- evoking questions (e.g., “What day was it? Was it warm? Were there many people?”). Measurement Hostile belief rating To measure the believability of idiosyncratic hostile cognitions, participants were asked to estimate a hostile belief rating (i.e., the likelihood of their thought being true) on a visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0% to 100%. Aggressive tendencies Aggressive tendencies were assessed by asking participants to indicate how likely they would be to respond with aggression (i.e., by attacking, shouting, or throwing with objects) if the event in the autobiographical memory were to happen right now on a VAS ranging from 0 (not at all) to 100 (very likely). State anger State anger was measured using the anger subscale of the 32-item profile of mood states (POMS) (McNair et al., 1992). Participants are asked to indicate the extent to which each item reflected their current affective state on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much) (i.e., “bad-tempered”, “annoyed”, “rebellious”, “furious”, “grouchy”, “angry”, and “on edge”). Internal consistency of the POMS is good –in the present study