Attention bias modification in specific fears: Spiders versus snakes
| Autor: | Eni S. Becker, Lea Rengers, Anja Barth, Mike Rinck, Xijia Luo, Nessa Ikani |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: |
Adult
Male Adolescent Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Attentional bias Affect (psychology) Developmental psychology Arousal Specific phobia Experimental Psychopathology and Treatment Young Adult Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) Bias Heart Rate Surveys and Questionnaires medicine Animals Humans Generalizability theory Attention Psychiatric Status Rating Scales Phobias Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Social anxiety Snakes Spiders medicine.disease Psychiatry and Mental health Clinical Psychology Phobic Disorders Anxiety Female medicine.symptom Psychology Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 49, Pt A, pp. 30-36 Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 49, 30-36 |
| ISSN: | 0005-7916 |
| Popis: | Item does not contain fulltext BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Attention Bias Modification (ABM) is used to manipulate attention biases in anxiety disorders. It has been successful in reducing attention biases and anxious symptoms in social anxiety and generalized anxiety, but not yet in specific fears and phobias. METHODS: We designed a new version of the dot-probe training task, aiming to train fearful participants' attention away from or towards pictures of threatening stimuli. Moreover, we studied whether the training also affected participants' avoidance behavior and their physical arousal upon being confronted with a real threat object. RESULTS: In Experiment 1, students with fear of spiders were trained. We found that the attention manipulation was successful, but the training failed to affect behavior or arousal. In Experiment 2, the same procedure was used on snake-fearful students. Again, attention was trained in the expected directions. Moreover, participants whose attention had been trained away from snakes showed lower physiological arousal upon being confronted with a real snake. LIMITATIONS: The study involved healthy students with normal distribution of the fear of spider/snake. Future research with clinical sample could help with determining the generalizability of the current findings. CONCLUSIONS: The effect of ABM on specific phobia is still in question. The finding in the present study suggested the possibility to alter attentional bias with a dot-probe task with general positive stimuli and this training could even affect the behavior while encountering a real threat. 7 p. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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