Psychology Commons^™

The Causal Role Of Selective Information Processing Biases Towards Threat In Anxiety, Sarah J. Egan

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The causal link between selective information processing biases and vulnerability to anxiety was investigated by examining change in emotional vulnerability as mediated by attentional training. Training was given on a modified dot-probe detection task, where participants were trained either to attend towards threat or towards neutral stimuli. Pre and post training assessment consisted of the anagram stress task (measure of emotional vulnerability), the dot-probe detection task (measure of training effectiveness), and the emotional Stroop task (measure of generalisation of training). The 54 undergraduate student participants, who were in a mid-range of trait anxiety, were randomly allocated to one of 3 …