Attentional bias and spider phobia: Conceptual and clinical issues

https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(93)90038-VGet rights and content

Abstract

Experimental evidence indicates that anxious subjects show an attentional bias for threatrelevant information. Foa and McNally (1986) (Cognitive Therapy and Research, 10, 477–485) and Watts et al. (1986) (British Journal of Psychology, 77, 97–108) reported that behaviour therapy can eliminate this attentional bias. A replication study was carried out in order to increase the evidence for exposure being the crucial component in reducing attentional bias. Moreover, in this study some conceptual and clinical issues are explored. The theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.

References (20)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (137)

  • Neural substrates of the emotion-word and emotional counting Stroop tasks in healthy and clinical populations: A meta-analysis of functional brain imaging studies

    2018, NeuroImage
    Citation Excerpt :

    For instance, interference in color-naming performance has been identified across different types of anxiety disorders (Bar-Haim et al., 2007; Williams et al., 1996), such that patients with spider phobia exhibit slower naming of spider-related words (Watts et al., 1986), whereas patients with social phobia exhibit slower naming of speech-related words (Becker et al., 2001; Lundh and Öst, 1996). Notably, the pronounced interference of anxiety-related words normalized with successful treatment, suggesting that the interference in the EST represents a treatment-sensitive marker (Lavy et al., 1993; Mattia et al., 1993; Watts et al., 1986). Finally, robust interference effects have been demonstrated in patients with substance use disorders, who typically exhibit a strong color-naming interference for substance-related words, an effect that has been directly related to craving and drug seeking (Cox et al., 2006; Field et al., 2009; Hester et al., 2006).

  • Neural time course of threat-related attentional bias and interference in panic and obsessive-compulsive disorders

    2013, Biological Psychology
    Citation Excerpt :

    In a visual dot probe task, socially phobic participants had potentiated P1 amplitudes to angry-neutral versus happy-neutral face-pairs and decreased P1 amplitudes to probes replacing emotional faces, taken to indicate hypervigilance-avoidance patterns of attention (Mueller et al., 2009). While these studies have provided additional information about attentional biases to threat in anxiety, pictorial stimuli do not reliably induce RT interference (Kindt & Brosschot, 1999; Kolassa & Miltner, 2006; Kolassa, Musial, Mohr, Trippe, & Miltner, 2005; Lavy, van den Hout, & Arntz, 1993; Mueller et al., 2009), hence these studies have not determined the mechanisms mediating emotional Stroop interference. There is evidence that emotional content influences ERPs to words during early time windows such as the P1 time window (80–120 ms; Bayer, Sommer, & Schacht, 2012; Bernat, Bunce, & Shevrin, 2001; Junghöfer, Bradley, Elbert, & Lang, 2001; Li, Zinbarg, & Paller, 2007; Scott, O’Donnell, Leuthold, & Sereno, 2009), and that involuntary attention allocation in the visual cortex is not limited to pictorial stimuli, but can occur for word stimuli which have only arbitrary relationships between their visual features and corresponding meaning (Bayer et al., 2012; Ortigue et al., 2004; Rabovsky, Sommer, & Abdel Rahman, 2011).

  • An Update on Anxiety Disorders: Etiological, Cognitive & Neuroscientific Aspects

    2022, An Update on Anxiety Disorders: Etiological, Cognitive & Neuroscientific Aspects
View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text