The degree of control exerted by phobic and non-phobic verbal stimuli over the recognition behaviour of phobic and non-phobic subjects

No attentional bias for pictoral stimuli in spider-fearful subjects

“…This attentional bias phenomenon is not restricted to spider phobia (for reviews see, e.g., Dalgleish & Watts, 1990;Litz & Keane, 1989). That is, attentional bias toward fear-relevant cues has been found in agoraphobia (e.g., Burgess, Jones, Robertson, Radcliffe, & Emerson, 1981), social fear (Hope, Rapee, Heimberg, & Dombeck, 1990), and other anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety (MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986), obsessive compulsive disorder (Foa & McNally, 1986), and post-traumatic stress disorder (McNally, Kaspi, Riemann, & Zeitlin, 1990). Furthermore, the attentional bias phenomenon in anxious subjects has been documented with several experimental techniques: besides the modified Stroop color task, dichotic listening, dot-probe reaction time tasks, and auditory recognition have been employed (MacLeod, 1991).…”

Memory and attention in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder: a review

“…Anxious individuals may perform poorly on difficult experimental tasks because their cognitive systems preferentially process task-irrelevant information related to threat. In terms of clinically anxious patients, it has been found that such patients display an increased ability to encode emotionally threatening information (e.g., Burgess et al, 1981). If OCD patients are similar to other types of anxiety disorder patients, one would expect a similar attentional bias for threatening information in OCD, though perhaps to stimuli that are personally threatening (e.g., contamination-related words).…”

A dichotic listening analysis of body weight concern in bulimia nervosa

“…If bulimics are, indeed, characterized by a pathological concern about body shape and weight, then they should exhibit information processing biases for material related to their concerns similar to the biases for fear-relevant material exhibited by anxiety-disordered patients (e.g., Burgess et al, 1981;Foa & McNally, 1986). Thus, we predicted that bulimics would detect the target word FAT more often in the unattended passage than would controls.…”