Continual training of attentional bias in social anxiety

Attention training toward and away from threat in social phobia: Effects on subjective, behavioral, and physiological measures of anxiety

“…Regarding social phobia, Li, Tan, Qian, and Liu (2008) observed that, in comparison to a control condition, 7-days of attention training toward positive faces diminished attentional bias for negative faces and reduced self-reported fear of social interaction.…”

Limited transfer of threat bias following attentional retraining

“…This result has inspired researchers to investigate the clinical application of computerized attention training to reduce anxiety symptoms. Recently, experimentally induced reductions in attentional bias using the modified dot probe task have been shown to reduce symptoms of social anxiety (Amir, Weber, Beard, Bomyea, & Taylor, 2008;Amir, Beard, Taylor et al, 2009;Li, Tan, Qian, & Liu, 2008;Schmidt, Richey, Buckner, & Timpano, 2009) and generalized anxiety disorder (Amir, Beard, Burns, & Bomyea, 2009;Hazen, Vasey, & Schmidt, 2009). As such, the reduction of attentional bias seems to be effective as a clinical intervention for anxiety disorders (e.g., Hakamata et al, 2010).…”

Attentional bias modification based on visual probe task: methodological issues, results and clinical relevance

“…40 Likewise, the four studies that used positive training increased AB for positive stimuli. Moreover, they had a negative correlation with anxiety, 42 stress reactivity, 43 fewer negative thought intrusions in a worry test 45 and generalization to other measures of stress. 44 Of the three studies that used only avoid groups, one did not conduct a post test because it did not find AB for threat at baseline, 46 whereas the other two found a reduction in the post-training AB, with effects generalized to other scales and self-reported symptoms of anxiety, worrying and depression.…”

“…Two of these studies manipulated the attend group to threat or negative stimuli 39,40 and four, to positive stimuli. [41][42][43][44] The first two found that the treated groups increased AB for threat or negative stimuli when compared with the control groups. They also found that the effects correlated with higher anxiety scores 39 and were potentiated by explicit instructions before training.…”

“…62,65 Similar encouraging results were found in two other recent studies. 63,64 In the first, groups were trained either to attend to healthy food or to attend to unhealthy food, and 33 Avoid (-)/control Yes No Amir et al 6 Avoid (-)/control Yes Yes Hazen et al 26 Avoid (-)/control Yes Yes Heeren et al 27 Avoid (-)/control Yes Yes See et al 28 Avoid (-)/control Yes Yes Heeren et al 29 Avoid (-)/control Yes No MacLeod et al 7 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes Yes Browning et al 19 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes Yes MacLeod et al 34 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes Yes Van Bockstaele et al 35 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes No Van Bockstaele et al 36 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes No Eldar et al 37 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Partly No O'Toole et al 38 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Partly No Heeren et al 39 Attend (-)/control Yes Yes Krebs et al 40 Attend (-)/control Yes Yes Hayes et al 41 Attend (+)/control Yes Yes Li et al 42 Attend (+)/control Yes Yes Taylor et al 43 Attend (+)/control Yes Yes Wadlinger et al 44 Attend (+)/control Yes Yes Cowart et al 46 Avoid (-) Not applicable Not applicable Amir et al 45 Avoid (-) Yes Yes Brosan et al 47 Avoid (-) Yes Yes Heeren et al 48 Avoid (-)/attend (+)/control Yes Yes Klumpp et al 49 Avoid (-)/attend (+)/control No No Boettcher et al 50 Attend ( 51 Avoid (-)/attend (+) Yes Yes Schoenmakers et al 10 Avoid (-)/control Yes No Schoenmakers et al 53 Avoid (-)/control Yes Partly Kerst et al 54 Avoid (-)/control Yes Partly Lopes et al 55 Avoid (-)/control Yes No McHugh et al 52 Avoid (-)/control No No Fie...…”