Using a gratingscales task as a sensitive measure of the attentional bias, we have recently observed a new form of frequency-specific cross-over; people showed left-biased preferences when comparing the high spatial frequency (HiSF) components of the task and rightward biases when comparing low spatial frequencies (LoSFs). Here we investigated which mechanisms underlie the cross-over. (1) We fo...

There are methodological complexities with the supraliminal-lexical versions of the modified versions of the Stroop tests that could be responsible for inconsistencies across the literature (Field & Cox, 2008). We tested whether a combination of subliminal-pictorial and classic Stroop tests can differentiate between dieters' and nondieters' food attentional bias (FAB). Participants were dieters...

The use of nicotine in the form of "snus" is substantial and increasing in some geographic areas, in particular among young people. It has previously been suggested that addictions may operate through a mechanism of attentional bias, in which stimuli representative of the dependent substance increase in salience, thus increasing the addictive behavior. However, this hypothesis has not been test...

The presence of an attentional bias towards disorder-related stimuli has not been consistently demonstrated in blood phobics. The present study was aimed at investigating whether or not an attentional bias, as measured by event-related potentials (ERPs), could be highlighted in blood phobics by inducing cognitive-emotional sensitization through the repetitive presentation of different disorder-...

OBJECTIVE Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that is involved in social emotional processing. A leading hypothesis is that oxytocin facilitates positive prosocial behaviors; the peptide may also play a more general role in inhibiting withdrawal-related social behaviors. The present study examined these possibilities. METHODS A double-blind, placebo controlled crossover design was used with 31 healthy...

Distraction is a strategy that is commonly used to cope with pain. Results concerning the efficacy of distraction from both experimental and clinical studies are variable, however, and indicate that its efficacy may depend on particular circumstances. Several models propose that distraction may be less effective for people who display a large attentional bias towards pain-related information. T...

External eaters reportedly increase snack intake when stressed, which could be due to an attentional shift towards food stimuli. Attentional biases for food stimuli were tested in high and low external eaters in stress and control conditions, using a computerised Stroop. A significant interaction was observed between external eating group and condition for snack word bias. This suggested that l...

The present study was aimed to examine attentional biases toward attractive and unattractive faces among face dissatisfied women. Twenty-seven women with high face dissatisfaction (HFD) and 27 women with low face dissatisfaction (LFD) completed a visual dot-probe task while their eye-movements were tracking. Under the condition of faces-neutral stimuli (vases) pairs, compared to LFD women, HFD ...