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Background and Objectives: Attention bias modification (ABM) procedures have shown promise as a therapeutic intervention, however current ABM procedures have proven inconsistent in their ability to reliably achieve the requisite change in attentional bias needed to produce emotional benefits. This highlights the need to better understand the precise task conditions that facilitate the intended change in attention bias in order to realise the therapeutic potential of ABM procedures. Based on the observation that change in attentional bias occurs largely outside conscious awareness, the aim of the current study was to determine if an ABM procedure delivered under conditions likely to preclude explicit awareness of the experimental contingency, via the addition of a working memory load, would contribute to greater change in attentional bias., Methods: Bias change was assessed among 122 participants in response to one of four ABM tasks given by the two experimental factors of ABM training procedure delivered either with or without working memory load, and training direction of either attend-negative or avoid-negative., Results: Findings revealed that avoid-negative ABM procedure under working memory load resulted in significantly greater reductions in attentional bias compared to the equivalent no-load condition., Limitations: The current findings will require replication with clinical samples to determine the utility of the current task for achieving emotional benefits., Conclusions: These present findings are consistent with the position that the addition of a working memory load may facilitate change in attentional bias in response to an ABM training procedure., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a neuromodulatory technique which has garnered recent interest in the potential treatment for emotion-based psychopathology. While accumulating evidence suggests that tDCS may attenuate emotional vulnerability, critically, little is known about underlying mechanisms of this effect. The present study sought to clarify this by examining the possibility that tDCS may affect emotional vulnerability via its capacity to modulate attentional bias towards threatening information. Fifty healthy participants were randomly assigned to receive either anodal tDCS (2 mA/min) stimulation to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), or sham. Participants were then eye tracked during a dual-video stressor task designed to elicit emotional reactivity, while providing a concurrent in-vivo measure of attentional bias. Greater attentional bias towards threatening information was associated with greater emotional reactivity to the stressor task. Furthermore, the active tDCS group showed reduced attentional bias to threat, compared to the sham group. Importantly, attentional bias was found to statistically mediate the effect of tDCS on emotional reactivity, while no direct effect of tDCS on emotional reactivity was observed. The findings are consistent with the notion that the effect of tDCS on emotional vulnerability may be mediated by changes in attentional bias, holding implications for the application of tDCS in emotion-based psychopathology. The findings also highlight the utility of in-vivo eye tracking measures in the examination of the mechanisms associated with DLPFC neuromodulation in emotional vulnerability., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

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., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Adaptive emotion regulation is characterized by the ability to flexibly select and switch between different strategies, depending on individual and contextual factors. Previous studies have shown that people prefer disengagement strategies to regulate more intense emotions, while they prefer engagement strategies to regulate less intense emotions. In this study, we investigated whether – in addition to the intensity of emotions – the discrete emotion type (disgust versus fear) also affects emotion regulation strategy preferences. A total of 401 students from three different universities completed an emotion regulation choice task in which they could choose between distraction and reappraisal to regulate their emotions in response to viewing high versus low intensity disgust- and fear-evoking pictures. We found that strategy choices did indeed depend on the nature of specific emotions, with distraction being preferred for regulating disgust, and reappraisal being preferred for regulating fear. Crucially, the nature of the emotion also qualified the previously reported effect of emotion intensity on strategy choice: Only for disgust- but not for fear-evoking pictures did participants show an increased preference for distraction over reappraisal with increased emotion intensity. Our results thus show that the effects of emotional intensity on emotion regulation strategy choice are emotion-specific and indicate that factors affecting emotion regulation strategy choice interact with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Emotional Image Tolerance (EIT) task assesses tolerance of negative emotion induced by negatively valenced images. We made several minor modifications to the task (Study 1) and adapted the task to include positive and neutral images in order to assess whether individuals respond to the valence or the intensity of the image content (Study 2). In both studies, we assessed subjective distress, gender differences in task responses, and associations between behavioral and self-reported distress tolerance, and related constructs. Across both studies, the EIT successfully induced distress and gender differences were observed, with females generally indicating more distress than males. In Study 2, responses on the adapted EIT task were correlated with self-reported distress tolerance, rumination, and emotion reactivity. The EIT successfully induces distress and the correlations in Study 2 provide promising evidence of validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Individuals with heightened anxiety vulnerability demonstrate a bias favouring attention to negative information, and it has been argued that this reflects a difficulty to disengage from negative information. Methods to manipulate attentional bias have demonstrated inconsistent effectiveness, however such methods have not targeted biases in attentional disengagement specifically. A recently developed approach to attentional bias modification, labelled Emotion-in-Motion, has been proposed to result in facilitated attentional disengagement from information. Thus, the present study empirically investigated whether the Emotion-in-Motion task modifies biased attentional disengagement from negative information using eye-movement recordings. Methods: Forty-four participants completed the Emotion-in-Motion attention manipulation task under conditions designed to enhance attention (Attend Negative) or attenuate attention (Avoid Negative) to negative information. Biased attentional engagement with, and attentional disengagement from, negative information was examined subsequently. Results: Participants in the Avoid Negative condition demonstrated lower levels of biased attentional disengagement from negative information as compared to participants in the Attend Negative condition. No difference in biased attentional engagement with negative information was observed. Conclusions: It is concluded that the Emotion-in-Motion task serves to independently manipulate selective attentional disengagement from negative information and may be useful in investigating the specific role of biased attentional disengagement in emotional vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potentiation of neural activity in lateral prefrontal regions via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can reduce patterns of biased attention for threat and may facilitate intentional emotion regulation. The current study sought to determine whether left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex tDCS, in combination with intentional down-regulation of emotional responses would reduce negative appraisals of aversive content during emotional regulation (assessed during online tDCS), reduce patterns of biased attention and attention bias variability (assessed offline), and attenuate spontaneous (uninstructed) emotional reactivity to negative content (assessed offline) above tDCS or intentional down-regulation of emotions in isolation. Healthy participants (n = 116) were allocated to one of four experimental conditions involving either active or sham tDCS, combined with an either a down-regulate or maintain emotion regulation task. Attention bias/bias variability was assessed with an attentional probe task, and emotional reactivity was assessed in a negative video viewing task. tDCS did not affect the appraisals of negative stimuli during emotion regulation, and there were no effects on attention bias/bias variability. However, tDCS did attenuate emotional reactivity. Those receiving active stimulation showed smaller elevations in negative mood in response to viewing aversive video content compared with sham. The present findings are consistent with the potential of left frontal tDCS to attenuate negative emotional reactions to aversive content but provide no support for tDCS enhancement of emotion regulation, nor its impact on attention bias or attention bias variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: In two experiments, we investigated the effects of Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) on emotion regulation, i.e. the manner in which people influence emotional experiences. We hypothesized that decreases in attentional bias to threat would impair upregulation and improve downregulation of negative emotions, while increases in attentional bias to threat would improve upregulation and impair downregulation of negative emotions.Methods: Using the emotion-in-motion paradigm (Experiment 1, N = 60) and the visual search task (Experiment 2, N = 58), we trained participants to attend to either threatening or positive stimuli and we assessed emotion intensity while observing, upregulating, and downregulating emotions in response to grids of mixed emotional pictures.Results: In Experiment 1, the attend positive group reported more positive emotions while merely watching grids of training pictures and the attend threat group showed impaired upregulation of negative affect. In Experiment 2, the attend threat group reported intensified negative emotions for all three instructions, while the attend positive group remained largely stable over time.Limitations: We cannot unequivocally attribute these changes in emotion regulation to changes in attentional bias, as neither of the experiments yielded significant changes in attentional bias to threat.Conclusions: By showing that attentional bias modification procedures affect the manner in which people deal with emotions, we add empirical weight to the conceptual overlap between attentional bias modification and emotion regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention bias modification (ABM), in which participants are trained to direct attention away from negative information, has been shown to reduce anxiety. However, such findings have been inconsistent. Changes in attentional bias are often absent, suggesting need for further investigation of the underlying mechanisms of ABM, as well as better statistical methods to analyze ABM data in order to reduce inferential error. In this study, we (a) compared inhibition control training to standard ABM training conditions, and (b) demonstrated the benefits of using simple Bayesian analyses to analyze ABM data. We recruited 116 participants and assessed their attentional bias prior to and after training, which involved practice avoiding negative stimuli, attending to negative stimuli, or avoiding a non-emotional, exogenous attentional cue (inhibitory control training). Our results suggested no impact of any of the training conditions on attentional bias. We further demonstrate Bayesian analyses may help control for both Type I and Type II error relative to a frequentist approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorists have proposed that heightened anxiety vulnerability is characterised by reduced attentional control performance and have made the prediction in turn that elevating cognitive load will adversely impact attentional control performance for high anxious individuals to a greater degree than low anxious individuals. Critically however, existing attempts to test this prediction have been limited in their methodology and have presented inconsistent findings. Using a methodology capable of overcoming the limitations of previous research, the present study sought to investigate the effect of manipulating cognitive load on inhibitory attentional control performance of high anxious and low anxious individuals. High and low trait anxious participants completed an antisaccade task, requiring the execution of prosaccades towards, or antisaccades away from, emotionally toned stimuli while eye movements were recorded. Participants completed the antisaccade task under conditions that concurrently imposed a lesser cognitive load, or greater cognitive load. Analysis of participants’ saccade latencies revealed high trait anxious participants demonstrated generally poorer inhibitory attentional control performance as compared to low trait anxious participants. Furthermore, conditions imposing greater cognitive load, as compared to lesser cognitive load, resulted in enhanced inhibitory attentional control performance across participants generally. Crucially however, analyses did not reveal an effect of cognitive load condition on anxiety-linked differences in inhibitory attentional control performance, indicating that elevating cognitive load did not adversely impact attentional control performance for high anxious individuals to a greater degree than low anxious individuals. Hence, the present findings are inconsistent with predictions made by some theorists and are in contrast to the findings of earlier investigations. These findings further highlight the need for research into the relationship between anxiety, attentional control, and cognitive load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there is increasing interest in the causal relationship between attentional breadth and emotion regulation. To test this causal relationship, attentional breadth needs to be manipulated stringently. The aim of the current research was to establish whether visual attentional breadth could be manipulated through experimental training procedures. We conducted two single-session training experiments and one multiple-session training experiment, all of which contained pre- and post-training assessments to test the direct transfer effects of training on attentional breadth construed in different measures. For the first single-session training (Experiment 1), no training effects were found to transfer to the subsequent attentional breadth measures in terms of global-local processing preference. For the second single-session training (Experiment 2) and the 5-day training (Experiment 3) which combined both trainings from Experiment 1 and 2, there were some indications that attentional breadth can be decreased, but there was no evidence that it could be increased neither in terms of global-local processing preference nor in terms of scope of visual perception. Bayesian analysis confirmed the null hypothesis of no increase in attentional breadth through delivery of these training procedures. Therefore, our findings do not support the hypothesis that training variants of the Global-Local attentional breadth task or of the visuospatial attentional breadth task can stably alter attentional breadth in healthy students. Possible explanations and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Procedures that effectively modify attentional bias to negative information have been examined for their potential to be a source of therapeutic change in emotional vulnerability. However, the degree to which these procedures modify attentional bias is subject to individual differences. This generates the need to understand the mechanisms that influence attentional bias change across individuals. The present study investigated the association between individual differences in attentional control and individual differences in the magnitude of bias change evoked by an attentional bias modification procedure. The findings demonstrate that individual differences in two facets of attentional control, control of attentional inhibition and control of attentional selectivity, were positively associated with individual differences in the magnitude of attentional bias change. The present findings inform upon the cognitive mechanisms underpinning change in attentional bias, and identify a target cognitive process for research seeking to enhance the therapeutic effectiveness of attentional bias modification procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If meta-analysis is to provide valuable answers, then it is critical to ensure clarity about the questions being asked. Here, we distinguish two important questions concerning cognitive bias modification research that are not differentiated in the meta-analysis recently published by Cristea et al (2015) in this journal: (1) do the varying procedures that investigators have employed with the intention of modifying cognitive bias, on average, significantly impact emotional vulnerability?; and (2) does the process of successfully modifying cognitive bias, on average, significantly impact emotional vulnerability? We reanalyse the data from Cristea et al to address this latter question. Our new analyses demonstrate that successfully modifying cognitive bias does significantly alter emotional vulnerability. We revisit Cristea et al's conclusions in light of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attentional bias modification (ABM) is a promising therapeutic tool aimed at changing patterns of attentional selectivity associated with heightened anxiety. A number of studies have successfully implemented ABM using the modified dot-probe task. However others have not achieved the attentional change required to achieve emotional benefits, highlighting the need for new ABM methods. The current study compared the effectiveness of a newly developed ABM task against the traditional dot-probe ABM task. The new person-identity-matching (PIM) task presented participants with virtual cards, each depicting a happy and angry person. The task encourages selective attention toward or away from threat by requiring participants to make matching judgements between two cards, based either on the identities of the happy faces, or of the angry faces. Change in attentional bias achieved by both ABM tasks was measured by a dot-probe assessment task. Their impact on emotional vulnerability was assessed by measuring negative emotional reactions to a video stressor. The PIM task succeeded in modifying attentional bias, and exerting an impact on emotional reactivity, whereas this was not the case for the dot-probe task. These results are considered in relation to the potential clinical utility of the current task in comparison to traditional ABM methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attentional bias modification (ABM) represents one of a number of cognitive bias modification techniques which are beginning to show promise as therapeutic interventions for emotional pathology. Numerous studies with both clinical and non-clinical populations have now demonstrated that ABM can reduce emotional vulnerability. However, some recent studies have failed to achieve change in either selective attention or emotional vulnerability using ABM methodologies, including a recent randomised controlled trial by Carlbring et al. Some have sought to represent such absence of evidence as a sound basis not to further pursue ABM as an online intervention. While these findings obviously raise questions about the specific conditions under which ABM procedures will produce therapeutic benefits, we suggest that the failure of some studies to modify selective attention does not challenge the theoretical and empirical basis of ABM. The present paper seeks to put these ABM failures in perspective within the broader context of attentional bias modification research. In doing so it is apparent that the current findings and future prospects of ABM are in fact very promising, suggesting that more research in this area is warranted, not less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lack of behavioural engagement in health promotion or disease prevention is a problem across many health domains. In these cases where people face a genuine danger, a reduced focus on threat and low levels of anxiety or worry are maladaptive in terms of promoting protection or prevention behaviour. Therefore, it is possible that increasing the processing of threat will increase worry and thereby enhance engagement in adaptive behaviour. Laboratory studies have shown that cognitive bias modification (CBM) can increase or decrease anxiety and worry when increased versus decreased processing of threat is encouraged. In the current study, CBM for interpretation (CBM-I) is used to target engagement in sun protection behaviour. The goal was to investigate whether inducing a negative rather than a positive interpretation bias for physical threat information can enhance worry elicited when viewing a health campaign video (warning against melanoma skin cancer), and consequently lead to more adaptive behaviour (sun protection). Participants were successfully trained to either adopt a positive or negative interpretation bias using physical threat scenarios. However, contrary to expectations results showed that participants in the positive training condition reported higher levels of worry elicited by the melanoma video than participants in the negative training condition. Video elicited worry was, however, positively correlated with a measure of engagement in sun protection behaviour, suggesting that higher levels of worry do promote adaptive behaviour. These findings imply that more research is needed to determine under which conditions increased versus decreased processing of threat can drive adaptive worry. Various potential explanations for the current findings and suggestions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with most models of emotion, research has shown that threatening information receives attentional priority over neutral information. Recently, it has been suggested that the degree to which participants divide their attention across the visual field (the attentional window) may modulate the extent to which salient objects are attentionally prioritised. In the current study, participants were required to identify a target inside one of a variable number of coloured circles. One colour (Conditioned Stimulus, CS +) was fear-conditioned using an electrocutaneous stimulus at tolerance level. This search task was combined with a go/no-go task that required participants to either divide attention across the visual field to create a broad attentional window (global group), or focus their attention on the fixation point to create a narrow attentional window (local group). The results showed that only in the global group was the CS + colour prioritised over the neutral colours, indicating that a broader attentional window leads to enhanced attentional prioritisation of threat. Implications for research on attentional bias to threat are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background A pattern of attentional bias for threatening information is thought to be involved in the etiology of anxiety. Consistent with this idea, cognitive training techniques directly targeting such patterns of biased attention have been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety. Research seeking to establish the neurologic underpinnings of change in the attentional bias for threat have implicated, but not confirmed, the role of lateral prefrontal regions. Methods The current study sought to confirm experimentally the causal role of lateral prefrontal areas in the modification of attentional bias by delivering targeted cortical stimulation during attention bias modification training to assess the consequent effects on attentional bias change. While completing either an “attend threat” or “avoid threat” attention bias modification task, 77 volunteers (17–22 per group) received either active transcranial direct current stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or a sham stimulation control condition. Results Participants receiving active stimulation showed greater evidence of attentional bias acquisition in the targeted direction (toward or away from threat) compared with participants in the sham stimulation condition. Conclusions Our findings provide the first experimental evidence that increasing activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex leads to greater evidence of attention bias modification. This evidence confirms the role of these areas in facilitating change in the allocation of attention to threat. We believe this study provides a critical step in the translation of neuroimaging findings to novel neuromodulatory interventions capable of enhancing the treatment of emotional pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]