Attentional bias and its temporal dynamics among war veterans suffering from chronic pain: Investigating the contribution of post-traumatic stress symptoms

Mazidi, Mahdi; Vig, Kelsey D.; Ranjbar, Seyran; Ebrahimi, Mohammadreza; Khatibi, Ali

doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2019.102115

Cited by 17 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…While a small number of studies have attempted to control for the influence of general response time variability, the measures of RT-Var have been derived either from a brief number of practice trials (Mazidi et al, 2019;Zvielli et al, 2016), or from the same trials used to compute AB- Thus, the current study examined three alternative accounts regarding the cognitive underpinnings of the relationship between AB-Var and anxiety as outlined in the model depicted in Figure 1 below. The first hypothesis considered is that attention control alone mediates the relationship between AB-Var and anxiety.…”

Section: Regardless Of Whether Rt-var Explains the Relationship Betwementioning

confidence: 99%

What is attention bias variability? Examining the potential roles of attention control and response time variability in its relationship with anxiety

Clarke

Marinovic

Todd

et al. 2020

Behaviour Research and Therapy

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Recent years have seen a surge in research focused on the construct of attention bias variability. Interest in attention bias variability (AB-Var) appears to have stemmed in part from the proposed role that variation in attention bias may play in specific types of psychopathology (in particular posttraumatic stress disorder; Iacoviello et al., 2014; Swick & Ashley, 2017). In addition, there is increasing recognition that traditional measures of average attention bias (AB-Ave) show low levels of reliability (Price et al., 2015) as compared to measures of AB-Var (Zvielli, Bernstein, & Koster, 2015). A number of studies have now shown that measures of AB-Var are more reliable, and appear to be more strongly associated with variation in different measures of psychopathology as compared to traditional measures of attentional bias (e.g. Alon, Naim, Pine, Bliese, & Bar-Haim, 2019; Zvielli, Bernstein, et al., 2015). Amongst the most thoroughly investigated has been the relationship between AB-Var and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Based on mixed findings showing that attention bias in PTSD can be variously characterised by vigilance toward threat cues, attentional avoidance of threat-related stimuli and that there is interference of negative information on attentional processes, Iacoviello et al. (2014) speculated that intra-individual variability of attention bias may be associated with PTSD and potentially explain past inconsistent findings. To examine this they employed a measure of AB-Var that assesses variance in a moving average of attention bias index scores, demonstrating that individuals with PTSD showed higher levels of AB-Var compared to trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD, and controls. They also showed a positive relationship between variation in AB-Var and PTSD symptoms.

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Section: Regardless Of Whether Rt-var Explains the Relationship Betwementioning

confidence: 99%

What is attention bias variability? Examining the potential roles of attention control and response time variability in its relationship with anxiety

Clarke

Marinovic

Todd

et al. 2020

Behaviour Research and Therapy

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“…The FPQ-III has shown good psychometric properties in both clinical and non-clinical populations 37 . The Persian version of the questionnaire has reported good psychometric properties in previous research 38 . In the current study, the Cronbach’s alpha was 0.92.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 84%

Attentional control moderates the relationship between pain catastrophizing and selective attention to pain faces on the antisaccade task

Ranjbar

Mazidi

Sharpe

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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cognitive models of chronic pain emphasize the critical role of pain catastrophizing in attentional bias to pain-related stimuli. the aim of this study was (a) to investigate the relationship between pain catastrophizing and the ability to inhibit selective attention to pain-related faces (attentional bias); and (b) to determine whether attentional control moderated this relationship. one hundred and ten pain-free participants completed the anti-saccade task with dynamic facial expressions, specifically painful, angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions and questionnaires including a measure of pain catastrophizing. As predicted, participants with high pain catastrophizing had significantly higher error rates for antisaccade trials with pain faces relative to other facial expressions, indicating a difficulty disinhibiting attention towards painful faces. In moderation analyses, data showed that attentional control moderated the relationship between attentional bias to pain faces and pain catastrophizing. post-hoc analyses demonstrated that it was shifting attention (not focusing) that accounted for this effect. Only for those with high self-reported ability to shift attention was there a significant relationship between catastrophizing and attentional bias to pain. These findings confirm that attentional control is necessary for an association between attentional bias and catastrophizing to be observed, which may explain the lack of relationships between attentional bias and individual characteristics, such as catastrophizing, in prior research. Cognitive models of chronic pain propose pain catastrophizing as a risk factor that give rise to pain-related concerns and fuels attentional bias to pain-related information 1-6. However, meta-analyses have failed to find relationships between theoretically important constructs, such as pain catastrophizing and attentional biases 7,8. The absence of a relationship is problematic for these theories that suggest attentional biases are associated with pain catastrophizing 2-6. There are explanations for this lack of relationship. Todd et al. 1 argued that attentional biases have a curvilinear relationship with threat and therefore relationships are obscured when assessed by simple correlations. Van Ryckegham et al. 9 have argued that the context of attentional biases is important to whether biases towards or away from pain are helpful. Another possibility was raised by Dear et al. 10 , who found that the reliability of the dot-probe is poor, and reliability remains questionable for some indices using eye-tracking 11. Another frequently raised issue is the lack of ecological validity of the stimuli (typically words). Numerous authors have argued that pain-related images 12 , facial expressions 13 or somatosensory stimuli 5 are more suitable to assess attentional biases in pain. Although research has used facial expression (e.g. 19 , all studies have used static faces, whereas Ceccarini

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“…The available RT-based tasks have shown very poor reliability scores (Mazidi, Vig, Ranjbar, Ebrahimi, & Khatibi, 2019;Rodebaugh et al, 2016;Staugaard, 2009). Poor reliability has statistical and conceptual implications such as decreasing statistical power and reproducibility of findings (Loken & Gelman, 2017;MacLeod, Grafton, & Notebaert, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soleymani, Mazidi, Neimeijer, de Jong (2021). Eating disorder-specific rumination moderates the association between attentional bias to high-caloric foods and eating disorder symptoms: Evidence from a reliable free-viewing eye-tracking task.

Soleymani¹,

Mazidi²,

Niemeijer³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Cognitive theories of eating disorders implicate Attentional Bias (AB) towards food-related information in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. Empirical evidence for this proposal, however, has been inconsistent and the measures used to examine AB to food-related stimuli typically showed poor reliability. The aim of the current study was twofold. Firstly, we aimed to examine the psychometric properties of a newly devised eye-tracking task for the assessment of AB in the context of eating disorders. Secondly, we examined the role of Eating Disorder-specific (ED-specific) rumination as a potential moderator of the association between attentional bias to food images and eating disorder symptoms. One hundred and three female students were recruited and completed an eye-tracking task comprising 21 matrices that each contained 8 low-caloric and 8 high-caloric food images. Each matrix was presented for 6 s. First fixation location, first fixation latency and total dwell time were assessed for low and high-caloric food images and the dwell-time based AB measure showed good reliability based on Cronbach’s alpha and split-half method. In addition, the results revealed that the ED-specific rumination plays the hypothesized moderating role. Specifically, while participants with high levels of ED-specific rumination exhibited a positive association between AB to high-caloric foods and eating disorder symptoms, this association was eliminated among participants with lower levels of ED-specific rumination. The employed free-viewing task seems a reliable measure of AB to food-related stimuli and the moderation analysis emphasizes the critical role of ED-specific rumination for eating disorder symptoms. Implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

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Attentional bias and its temporal dynamics among war veterans suffering from chronic pain: Investigating the contribution of post-traumatic stress symptoms

Cited by 17 publications

References 90 publications

What is attention bias variability? Examining the potential roles of attention control and response time variability in its relationship with anxiety

What is attention bias variability? Examining the potential roles of attention control and response time variability in its relationship with anxiety

Attentional control moderates the relationship between pain catastrophizing and selective attention to pain faces on the antisaccade task

Soleymani, Mazidi, Neimeijer, de Jong (2021). Eating disorder-specific rumination moderates the association between attentional bias to high-caloric foods and eating disorder symptoms: Evidence from a reliable free-viewing eye-tracking task.

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