Attentional bias in German Armed Forces veterans with and without posttraumatic stress symptoms – An eye-tracking investigation and group comparison

Interplay among attention, appraisal, and memory bias in provisional posttraumatic stress disorder: Exploring the combined cognitive biases hypothesis.

“…Central to the cognitive model of PTSD is the idea that posttraumatic stress symptoms persist due to maladaptive trauma processing, including selective attention to threats, negative self and others' appraisal, and heightened retention of negative information (Ehlers & Clark, 2000). A burgeoning body of empirical evidence aligns with this theory, indicating individuals with posttraumatic stress symptoms manifest attention (Kuester et al, 2022;Lee & Lee, 2012), appraisal (Hardarson et al, 2023;Saraiya et al, 2019), and memory biases (Itoh et al, 2019) toward negative stimuli, distinguishing them from trauma-exposed healthy controls and unaffected individual. Moreover, strong associations have been observed between negative cognitive biases and posttraumatic stress symptoms (Meiser-Stedman et al, 2019;Ponnamperuma & Nicolson, 2016;Tudorache et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2022).…”