CV

Prof. Samuel Ho is an Associate Provost (Institutional Initiatives) and a Professor of Psychology at the City University of Hong Kong. As a registered clinical psychologist, his research interest is in psychopathology and psychotherapy with a focus on anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress. Prof. Ho’s current research focuses on the cognitive processing styles, including attentional biases and memory biases, related to depression and anxiety. Prof. Ho is also one of the representatives of positive psychology in Asia. He has been working on how to integrate the principles of positive psychology into conventional clinical psychology to help people to cope with and thrive from challenging situations.

KEYNOTE ABSTRACT

Cognitive factors associated with depression and anxiety in adolescents: clinical applications
This presentation will discuss the roles of attentional and memory biases on depression and anxiety among adolescents. Regarding attentional biases, findings of our previous studies suggest that negative attentional bias, but not positive attentional bias, was related to severity of anxiety symptoms. In our latest study on memory bias, 142 adolescents completed the item-method directed forgetting paradigm to measure their positive and negative memory bias. The results showed that participants with higher level of anxiety tended to exhibit more negative memory bias (i.e. they exhibited more difficulty in forgetting negative stimuli). More depressive symptoms were related to less negative memory bias, probably due to the avoidance tendency of depressive individuals. An anxiety x depression interaction effect on positive attentional bias was obtained. Individuals with higher anxiety levels would exhibit less positive memory bias only when they were also having high depression level. Implications on cognitive intervention strategies will be discussed.