Appraisal theories of emotion predict that the relevance of a stimulus to a person's needs and goals influences attentional allocation. We used a modified visual probe task to examine the influence of hunger and trait reward drive on food-related attentional bias. Both hunger and trait reward drive predicted degree of attentional "disengagement" from food images at short (100 ms), but not long ...

Attentional biases for negative stimuli have been observed in school-age and adolescent children of depressed mothers and may reflect a vulnerability to depression. The direction of these biases and whether they can be identified in early childhood remains unclear. The current study examined attentional biases in 5-7-year-old children of depressed and non-depressed mothers. Following a mood ind...

Biased attention to emotional stimuli plays a key role in the RDoC constructs of Sustained Threat and Loss. In this article, we review approaches to assessing these biases, their links with psychopathology, and the underlying neural influences. We then review evidence from twin and candidate gene studies regarding genetic influences on attentional biases. We also discuss the impact of developme...

Introduction: According to the pain research literature, attentional bias for pain is the mechanism responsible for the development and maintenance of fear of pain in patients with chronic pain. However, there is still some debate about the exact mechanism and the role of faster engagement versus difficulty in disengagement in the development of attentional bias.  Methods: To investigate ...

Infants demonstrate an attentional bias toward fearful facial expressions that emerges in the first year of life. The current study investigated whether this attentional bias is influenced by experience with particular face types. Six-month-old (n = 33) and 9-month-old (n = 31) Caucasian infants' spontaneous preference for fearful facial expressions when expressed by own-race (Caucasian) or oth...

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in attentional bias in addiction, particularly its clinical relevance. Specifically, numerous articles claimed to demonstrate either that (1) attentional bias measured in treatment settings could predict subsequent relapse to substance use, or (2) direct modification of attentional bias reduced substance use and improved treatment outcomes. In thi...

OBJECTIVES Anxiety leads to biases in processing personally relevant information. This study set out to examine whether anxious parents also experience biases in processing child-relevant material. DESIGN AND METHODS Ninety parents acted as a control condition, or received a social anxiety or child-related anxiety induction. They completed a task examining attentional biases in relation to ch...

This study investigated attentional biases in children with asthma. The study aimed at testing whether children with asthma are vigilant to asthma and/or anxiety cues. Thirty-six children (18 with asthma and 18 healthy controls) aged 9-12 completed a computerised dot probe task designed to measure attentional bias to three different categories of words: asthma, anxiety symptom and general negat...