There is extensive evidence for an association between an attentional bias towards emotionally negative stimuli and vulnerability to stress-related psychopathology. Less is known about whether selective attention towards emotionally positive stimuli relates to mental health and stress resilience. The current study used a modified Dot Probe task to investigate if individual differences in attent...

Social anxiety is thought to be maintained by biased attentional processing towards threatening information. Research has further shown that the experimental attenuation of this bias, through the implementation of attentional bias modification (ABM), may serve to reduce social anxiety vulnerability. However, the mechanisms underlying ABM remain unclear. The present study examined whether inhibi...

AIMS To investigate the mediating role of attentional bias for alcohol cues on alcohol-seeking following devaluation of alcohol. DESIGN Between subject. SETTING Eye-tracking laboratory at the University of Liverpool. PARTICIPANTS Student social drinkers (n = 64). MEASUREMENTS An operant choice task in which participants chose between simultaneously presented alcohol and non-alcohol drin...

When a person has a goal of drinking alcohol or using another addictive substance, the person appears to be automatically distracted by stimuli related to the goal. Because the attentional bias might propel the person to use the substance, an intervention might help modify it. In this article, we discuss techniques that have been developed to help people overcome their attentional bias for alco...

Recently, researchers have investigated the causal nature of attentional bias for threat (AB) in the maintenance of anxiety disorders by experimentally manipulating it. They found that training anxious individuals to attend to non-threat stimuli reduces AB, which, in turn, reduces anxiety. This effect supports the hypothesis that AB can causally impact the maintenance of anxiety. At a fundament...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Maladaptive perfectionism has been identified as a predisposing and perpetuating factor for a range of disorders, including eating, anxiety, and mood disorders. An influential model of perfectionism, put forward by Shafran, Cooper, and Fairburn (2002), proposes that high perfectionism reflects an attentional bias that operates to afford greater attention to negative in...

INTRODUCTION Attentional bias, the tendency that a person has to drive or maintain attention to a specific class of stimuli, may play an important role in the etiology and persistence of mental disorders. Attentional bias modification has been studied as a form of additional treatment related to automatic processing. OBJECTIVES This systematic literature review compared and discussed methods,...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES This study examines the effects of a single session of Cognitive Bias Modification to induce positive Interpretative bias (CBM-I) using standard or explicit instructions and an analogue of computer-administered CBT (c-CBT) program on modifying cognitive biases and social anxiety. METHODS A sample of 76 volunteers with social anxiety attended a research site. At both ...

The present study investigated the cross-sectional associations between cognitive biases (i.e., attentional bias and approach bias) and alcohol use and investigated the moderating role of gender, attentional control and inhibitory control. The sample consisted of 94 adolescents and young adults (52.1% boys) between 15.3 and 20.8 years old (Mage = 18.0, SD = 1.1) who reported drinking alcohol in...