I’M SCARED! ATTENTIONAL BIAS IN SPECIFIC PHOBIA

Attentional bias is the propensity to engage attention towards emotional stimuli. In particular, several theories propose that attentional bias contributes to the maintenance of a specific phobia. Many researchers show a facilitation of attentional engagement toward threatening stimuli (e.g. Mogg and Bradley, 2006; Vrijsen et al., 2009) or delayed of disengagement (e.g. Soares et al., 2009; Kolassa et al., 2005) or both (e.g. Rinck et al., 2005; Gerdes et al., 2008). These inconsistent results could depend on the various paradigms (i.e. Emotional Stroop Task, Visual Search Task or Dot-Probe Task) used. However, no study employed the Emotional Spatial Cueing Paradigm in phobic participants. The aim of the present study was to use this paradigm since it allows assessing all of the three attentional components of orienting: shift, engagement and disengagement. Phobic (P; N=20) and control participants (CP; N=20) were administered the Phobia Inventory (Sanavio, 1986) and the Emotional Spatial Cueing. We used threatening and neutral faces as cues, selected by Maccari et al.’s (2014) database. The 2 (Group: P; CP) x 2 (Validity: valid, invalid) x 2 (Emotion: threatening; neutral) ANOVA on reaction times shows the main effect of Validity (F1,37=100.09; p=.0001) and the Group x Emotion x Validity interaction (F1,37=5.19; p=.02), that revealed a higher attentional engagement toward threatening cues in P than in CP (515.02ms vs. 529.75ms). Our findings confirm an attentional bias toward threatening stimuli in P and they revealed that it is due to a higher engagement toward threatening stimuli. These results could suggest the importance of using attentional bias modification (ABM) with phobic patients. This training could reduce the attentional engagement toward threatening stimuli and could improve the psychological health of phobic patients.