SEMINAR: Psychology postgrad seminar

Past research has proposed that an attentional bias for threatening stimuli plays a role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Such findings have led researchers to experimentally test the hypothesis that an attentional bias to threat causally contributes to anxiety, by determining whether the modification of such a bias serves to change anxiety reactions to threat. The present study was designed to test the causal role of the biased attentional response to spiders, by testing the prediction that the modification of attentional bias to spider stimuli would serve to modify the intensity of the subjective anxiety elicited by exposure to spiders. Forty mid-range spider fearful psychology students were randomly allocated to an ‘attend threat’ training condition versus an ‘attend neutral’ training condition. The training induced a differential attentional bias between the training conditions, with the ‘attend threat’ group showing a significantly greater attentional bias to spider stimuli following training compared to the ‘attend neutral’ group. Furthermore, following the attentional training, there were significant differences between the training conditions in the subjective anxiety experienced by the individuals when exposed to a live spider. Individuals in the ‘attend threat’ group showed significantly greater elevations in the rates of anxiety they experienced as they approached the live spider compared to the ‘attend neutral’ group. These findings provide clear empirical evidence that biased attentional responding to spiders makes a causal contribution to the intensity of the subjective anxiety elicited by exposure to a live spider. This research could have important implications in improving treatment therapies for individuals suffering from specific fears.