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Insomnia is a prevalent problem in the general population and can greatly influence multiple aspects of daily life. Some research has found that interpretation bias (i.e. interpreting ambiguous information in a threatening sleep-related manner) is associated with sleep difficulties and insomnia. However, much of the research investigating this relationship is cross-sectional, limiting our understanding of the direction of this relationship. In an analogue sample of students experiencing at least some degree of sleep difficulty, we investigate the relationship between interpretation bias, and sleep-related worry and sleep quality over the subsequent week through a twice-daily diary.

Additional file 2. Screenshots of instructions for interpretation bias task.

Additional file 1. General threat scenarios and interpretations from Interpretation Bias Recognition Task.

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-epp-10.1177_20438087211007597 for Assessing distress tolerance using a modified version of the Emotional Image Tolerance task by Ashley Slabbert, Penelope Hasking, Lies Notebaert and Mark Boyes in Journal of Experimental Psychopathology

Attentional control theory indicates a relationship between poor attentional control and heightened anxiety vulnerability. While attentional control is often assessed via self-report, there is inconsistency as to whether such self-report measures (in particular the Attentional Control Scale) provide an indication of genuine attentional control abilities. The present study sought to determine the presence or absence of a relationship between questionnaire and behavioural measures of attentional control, and to examine the association between these measures and psychological symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, in a large non-clinical sample. Undergraduate students and individuals from the community (final sample n= 207) completed the Attentional Control Scale and measures of psychological distress (depression, anxiety, stress), as well as the antisaccade task as an objective measure of attentional control. Antisaccade performance was significantly associated with both anxiety (r= -.187) and stress (r= -.195). Self-reported attentional control also correlated significantly with all measures of psychological distress (r= -.307 to -.459). Critically however, there was no evidence for an association between full or subscale measures on the Attentional Control Scale and antisaccade performance (r= .027 to .078). Bayesian analyses indicated moderate to strong evidence that the null hypothesis is true (B10= 0.094 - 0.161), suggesting that this finding was likely to represent the genuine absence of an association. The present study is consistent with growing evidence that self-reported measures of attentional control are not in fact measuring variation in attentional control abilities, and speaks to the importance of incorporating objective assessments of attentional control in research.

Task relevance affects emotional attention in healthy individuals. Here, we investigate whether the association between anxiety and attention bias is affected by the task relevance of emotion during an attention task. Participants completed two visual search tasks. In the emotion-irrelevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of neutral, middle-aged faces was old or young. Irrelevant to the task, target faces displayed angry, happy, or neutral expressions. In the emotion-relevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of middle-aged neutral faces was happy or angry (target faces also varied in age). Trait anxiety was not associated with attention in the emotion-relevant task. However, in the emotion-irrelevant task, trait anxiety was associated with a bias for angry over happy faces. These findings demonstrate that the task relevance of emotional information affects conclusions about the presence of an anxiety-linked attention bias.