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Metacognitive biases in anxious-depression and compulsivity extend across perception and memory
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Description: Metacognitive biases are characteristic of common mental health disorders like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, recent transdiagnostic approaches to metacognitive research have gathered results contrasting with those of more traditional clinical studies, namely observing overconfidence in high compulsive individuals with perceptual tasks as opposed to lowered memory confidence in OCD patients. We sought to reconcile these differences by examining three possible explanations: confidence impairments in psychopathology (i) are restricted to specific cognitive domains, (ii) are overshadowed by co-occurring mental health symptoms, and/or (iii) manifest differently at disparate levels of a metacognitive hierarchy. We used a transdiagnostic individual differences approach (N=327) to quantify patterns of metacognitive function across memory and perception. Across both perception and memory tasks, we found that lower confidence was linked to anxious-depression, and higher confidence was linked to compulsivity. These associations showed differential associations across the confidence hierarchy, with anxious-depression being predominantly explained by a global measure of low self-esteem, whereas compulsivity exhibited more specific alterations at lower metacognitive levels. Our results thus support a domain-general alteration of metacognition in psychopathology, with differential contributions from distinct levels of a metacognitive hierarchy.
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