Itch-Related Avoidance and Attentional Biases in Patients with Psoriasis?

Nadinda, Putu Gita; Laarhoven, Antoinette I. M. van; Evers, Andrea; Maas, Joyce; Beugen, Sylvia van

doi:10.1016/j.jid.2023.02.032

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Another factor that might explain the difference in effect sizes between studies could be the degree to which participant variables were controlled for. The present study, as well as the two studies from the Netherlands (Nadinda et al, 2023;van Beugen et al, 2016) matched patients and controls for age, gender, depression and anxiety. In these studies, either no AB (Experiment 1-3 of the present study, as well as Nadinda et al, 2023;van Beugen et al, 2016) or an AB of small magnitude (Exp.…”

Section: Gen Er a L Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…The present study, as well as the two studies from the Netherlands (Nadinda et al, 2023;van Beugen et al, 2016) matched patients and controls for age, gender, depression and anxiety. In these studies, either no AB (Experiment 1-3 of the present study, as well as Nadinda et al, 2023;van Beugen et al, 2016) or an AB of small magnitude (Exp. 4 of the present study) were observed.…”

Section: Gen Er a L Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…No evidence for an attentional bias was observed, which may be due to either a smaller sample size, the lower disease severity of psoriasis or because of the fact that in the van Beugen study, patients and controls were matched for levels of depression and anxiety. Very recently the same group (Nadinda et al, 2023) reported an additional task from the same sample where words related to itch (which is one important symptom in psoriasis, Elewski et al, 2019) were compared with neutral words. Again, no evidence for an attentional bias was observed.…”

Section: Statement Of Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Attentional bias in psoriasis: The role of processing time and emotional valence

Etty,

George,

van Laarhoven

et al. 2023

British J Health Psychol

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

PurposeThe present study explored whether people with psoriasis display an attentional bias towards disease‐related threat words and whether this bias occurs relatively early during the phase of stimulus disengagement, or during a later maintained attention phase dominated by controlled strategic processes. We also explored the degree to which attentional bias is dependent on the emotional valence of control words.MethodsIndividuals with psoriasis and matched controls took part in 4 online experiments. Participants completed a spatial cueing paradigm using disease‐related threat words and control words as cues, in order to obtain reaction time estimates of attentional bias.ResultsWe did not observe evidence for attentional bias when control words were matched with threat words for emotional valence, regardless of whether processing time for the cues was limited (Experiment 1: SOA = 250 ms) or extended (Experiment 2: SOA = 1050 ms). We also did not observe evidence for attentional bias when control words of positive valence were used, but processing time was limited (Experiment 3). An attentional bias was only observed (p = .012, Cohen's d = .37) when sufficient processing time was available and positively‐valanced control words were used (Experiment 4).ConclusionRather than showing large and generalized AB effects as predicted by previous accounts, our results tentatively suggest that AB in psoriasis is restricted to situations where participants have ample processing time and threat words are easily distinguishable from control words on the basis of emotional valence. The pattern of results suggests that attentional bias in psoriasis is best characterized as a relatively slow strategic process.

show abstract