Effects of attention bias modification with short and long stimulus-duration: A randomized experiment with individuals with subclinical social anxiety

Attention Bias Modification (ABM): Review of Effects of Multisession ABM Training on Anxiety and Threat-Related Attention in High-Anxious Individuals

“…Analyses of RTs vary across studies, as not all compare invalid-cue and valid-cue trial conditions, and AB is sometimes indexed by the RT difference between invalid-threat versus invalid-nonthreat trials and sometimes by RTs on invalid-threat trials rather than by RT-difference scores (e.g., Amir, Beard, Taylor et al, 2009; Bar-Haim et al, 2011; Liang & Hsu, 2016). Interpretation of RTs can be uncertain; for example, faster RTs on invalid-threat trials at posttraining than pretraining may reflect practice effects on that trial type.…”

“…Three studies, which found superior anxiolytic effects of ABM-threat-avoidance training (relative to CON-attention training), assessed AB on spatial-cuing tasks (Amir, Beard, Taylor et al, 2009; Bar-Haim et al, 2011; Liang & Hsu, 2016). Although none of these studies showed pretraining AB to threat (i.e., no difference in RTs between invalid-threat and invalid-nonthreat trials), they reported RT changes from pre- to posttraining, which included faster RTs to probes appearing in a different location to threat cues (i.e., faster RTs on invalid-threat trials) following ABM training.…”

“…Several studies reported greater anxiety reduction during ABM-threat-avoidance than CON-attention training . Specifically, eight studies indicated that standard ABM-threat-avoidance training was superior to CON-attention training in reducing anxiety, all of which administered training under experimenter-controlled conditions (i.e., laboratory- or clinic-based settings: Amir, Beard, Burns et al, 2009; Amir, Beard, Taylor et al, 2009; Bar-Haim et al, 2011; Eldar et al, 2012; Hazen, Vasey, & Schmidt, 2009; Kuckertz, Amir et al, 2014; Li et al, 2008; Liang & Hsu, 2016). These studies mostly used the visual-probe task for ABM training (one used the spatial-cuing task; Bar-Haim et al, 2011) with a variety of stimulus types (e.g., pairings of threat-neutral words, disgust-neutral faces, angry-neutral faces, negative-positive faces).…”

“…Although none of these studies showed pretraining AB to threat (i.e., no difference in RTs between invalid-threat and invalid-nonthreat trials), they reported RT changes from pre- to posttraining, which included faster RTs to probes appearing in a different location to threat cues (i.e., faster RTs on invalid-threat trials) following ABM training. Liang and Hsu (2016) found RT changes varied with the exposure duration (100, 500 ms) of stimuli used in training and assessment and suggested that the effect of ABM on RT may reflect changes in both attention control and AB to threat (i.e., results showed a complex five-way interaction that included RT speeding effects on both invalid-threat and invalid-neutral trials that depended on specific stimulus-exposure durations used in AB assessment and ABM training).…”

“…Studies that assessed pre-training AB from nonstandard visual-probe scores or spatial-cuing tasks showed mixed findings. Comparison of RTs from threat-present (invalid-threat or incongruent-threat trials) and threat-absent (nonthreat) trials included findings of threat-related RT-slowing (Kuckertz, Gildebrant et al, 2014; Neubauer et al, 2013), threat-related RT-speeding (Boettcher et al, 2012), or no RT difference between invalid-threat and invalid-nonthreat trials (Amir, Beard, Taylor et al, 2009; Bar-Haim et al, 2011; Heeren, Mogoase, McNally et al, 2015; Liang & Hsu, 2016) before training. In Sigurjónsdóttir et al (2015), pretraining AB (assessed on the spatial-cuing task) varied across treatment groups, with some showing AB to threat words and others no bias.…”