The effect of a single-session attention modification program on response to a public-speaking challenge in socially anxious individuals.

Abstract

Research suggests that individuals with social anxiety show an attention bias for threat-relevant information However, few studies have directly manipulated attention to examine its effect on anxiety. In the current article, the authors tested the hypothesis that an attention modification program would be effective in reducing anxiety response and improving performance on a public-speaking challenge. Socially anxious participants completed a probe detection task by identifying letters (E or F) replacing one member of a pair of faces (neutral or disgust). The authors trained attention by including a contingency between the location of the neutral face and the probe in one group (Attention Modification Program; AMP). Participants in the AMP group showed significantly less attention bias to threat after training and lower levels of anxiety in response to a public-speaking challenge than did the participants in the Attention Control Condition (ACC) group. Moreover, blind raters judged the speeches of those in the AMP group as better than those in the ACC group. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that attention plays a causal role in the maintenance of social anxiety.

Attention bias modification via single-session dot-probe training: Failures to replicate

“…Individual bias acquisition scores were not related to congruent biases on an affective task-switching task presenting new, non-trained stimuli. This finding seems to be in contrast with prior studies reporting transfer from dot-probe training to new stimuli presented in a spatial cueing (attention) task (Amir et al, 2009;Amir et al, 2008;Heeren et al, 2011). Furthermore, we found no evidence for transfer of individual training effects to interpretation bias.…”

“…In their study, participants were trained to attend either toward or away from threatening pictures, but training effects did not generalize to an emotional interference task measuring processes related to attention. These findings contradict earlier observations suggesting that dotprobe training effects generalize to a spatial cueing task, that is, conditions resembling the initial training task (Amir et al, 2009;Amir, Weber, Beard, Bomyea, & Taylor, 2008;Heeren, Lievens, & Philippot, 2011). Moreover, there is some evidence for transfer of ABM to memory.…”

“…In contrast to prior research reporting effective modification of attention through dot-probe training in healthy samples (Hakamata et al, 2010;Hallion & Ruscio, 2011;Mogoase et al, 2014), we foundacross three studies-no evidence that dot-probe ABM can induce or reduce attention biases via a single-session training. Although the applied training procedure closely resembled procedures that have effectively implemented ABM (Amir et al, 2008;Van Bockstaele et al, 2011), we did not find changes in attention bias at the training condition level in response to training toward negative, positive, or away from negative with various stimulus materials (i.e., emotional scenes, words, facial expressions) and stimulus presentation durations (500ms, 750ms, 1000ms). Thus, the present findings add to recent research that did not replicate successful ABM delivery (e.g., Boettcher et al, 2013;Carlbring et al, 2012;Rapee et al, 2013).…”

“…ABM consisted of a dot-probe procedure modeled after Amir et al (2008) and Van Bockstaele et al (2011). On each trial, a 500 ms fixation was followed by of the presentation of two pictures (3.82° height by 5.06 width) above and below fixation for 500 ms.…”

Attention bias dynamics and symptom severity during and following CBT for social anxiety disorder.

“…We employed a modified version of the Posner spatial cueing paradigm (Posner, Snyder, & Davidson, 1980), which has been previously used to assess attention bias in social anxiety disorder (Amir et al, 2003;Amir, Weber, Beard, Bomyea, & Taylor, 2008;Julian, Beard, Schmidt, Powers, & Smits, 2012). In this task, a word that is either socially positive (e.g.…”