THE BEADS TASK AS A TOOL TO MEASURE INTOLERANCE OF UNCERTAINTY AND JUMPING TO CONCLUSION BIAS IN CLINICAL GROUPS: A REVIEW

Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) is a hierarchical construct influencing behaviors conceptualized as a cognitive and emotional filter, through which the environment is viewed and uncertainty, is regarded and experimented as unacceptable and unfair. IU is a critical transdiagnostic personality factor associated with different psychopatologic conditions and Affective disorders like Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Depression (D). Laboratory paradigms were devised to obtain in vivo measures of IU, by quantifying the relationship between self-report IU and performance on behavioural tasks involving uncertainty, capturing participants’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to actual uncertain scenarios. One of such tool is the Beads Task, a probabilistic inference task to assess uncertainty reactions. Participants are shown two jars each composed of 100 beads of two different colours in a particular ratio (e.g., 85:15 red beads to blue beads vs. 85:15 blue to red). Participants are told that beads are drawn one by one from one of the jars, which have the same probability to be chosen. The aim is to decide from which jar the beads are being drawn. High IU is expected to be associated with greater requirement of pieces of beads and time to decide. Beads Task, in addition to being a behavioural measure of IU, was classically used in psychosis and delusion research area and allowed the measurement of the so called Jumping to Conclusion (JTC) bias, ‘‘a tendency or biasto the early acceptance and, to a lesser extent, the early rejection of hypotheses’’. A JTC style is considered to be only one of a number of factors that potentially contribute in complex ways to the formation and retention of delusions. Clinical implications and contemporary research state of the art are discussed.