Believing The Worst: Hostile Intent Attribution Bias
ADHD, Autism, and negative intent attribution bias
Assumptions
When an Autistic person or person with ADHD receives a comment or has an interaction with someone that is neutral, we are more likely to interpret the person’s actions or words as negative, even malicious.
This is known as hostile intent attribution bias — it describes a tendency to interpret someone’s words or behaviour towards us in the most negative light, or to assume someone’s intentions were unfriendly when they were not.
The research is limited, but various studies have demonstrated the following possible causes of hostile attributions:
Low self-esteem and self-concept
Poor working memory and episodic memory
Executive functioning and social processing difficulties
Different interpretations of social cues compared to neurotypical (NT) people
A history of experiencing frequent bullying, criticism, correction, and rejection
Cognitive distortions such as mental filtering, personalization, and mind-reading.
Emotional dysregulation
If we already struggle with emotional regulation, it stands to reason that we may jump to conclusions more quickly, or perceive interactions in an overly negative light.
When we are already feeling anxious, upset, angry, etc., we are more likely to remember and make associations between past instances when we felt that way and current situations.
In other words, being angry makes us angrier, and feeling mad or upset makes us susceptible to seeing things through a negative lens. This is due to something called state-dependent memory, which is a perfect segue into the next underlying cause.
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