The Efficacy of Attentional Bias Modification for Anxiety: A Registered Replicationuse asterix (*) to get italics

Nathan Pond, Frances Meeten, Patrick Clarke, Lies Notebaert, Ryan ScottPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"

2024

<p>Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) is a prevalent condition that has been linked to the presence of certain cognitive biases, including attention bias. Attention bias is the tendency to attend preferentially to threat-related stimuli and has been consistently observed in high anxious samples. Naturally, interventions aiming to modify these biases have been developed with the hopes of alleviating anxiety symptoms. However, while initial studies were promising, over time the reported efficacy of these attention bias modification (ABM) procedures in alleviating symptoms has become mixed, with some studies reporting moderate to large effect sizes, and others reporting non-significant effects. Furthermore, concerns have been raised regarding the potential for demand effects to be underlying previous significant findings. Therefore, we revisit the efficacy of ABM as a method for alleviating both attention bias, and in turn anxiety symptomology. As our primary objective we seek to conduct a direct replication of one of the seminal studies showing successful alleviation of anxiety symptoms using multi-session ABM training (Hazen et al., 2009), while adopting a Bayesian approach to analyses. As a secondary goal, we aim to quantify the potential influence of demand effects in the paradigm.</p>

anxiety; worry; GAD; cognitive bias modification; CBM-A; attention bias; ABM;

NonePlease indicate the methods that may require specialised expertise during the peer review process (use a comma to separate various required expertises).

Social sciences

Ioana Cristea [ioanaalina.cristea@unipd.it] suggested: Liviu Fodor liviu.andrei.fodor@gmail.com , Charlotte Krahé [c.m.krahe@ljmu.ac.uk] suggested: Apologies, I have no time at present. Try Lonneke van Tuijl: https://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/LAvanTuijl , Julian Basanovic [j.basanovic@exeter.ac.uk] suggested: I decline as I hold a conflict of interest with authors on this manuscript. , Julian Basanovic [j.basanovic@exeter.ac.uk] suggested: Some suggested reviewers: , Julian Basanovic [j.basanovic@exeter.ac.uk] suggested: Mike Rinck - https://www.ru.nl/en/people/rinck-m , Julian Basanovic [j.basanovic@exeter.ac.uk] suggested: Nader Amir - https://psychology.sdsu.edu/people/nader-amir/ , Julian Basanovic [j.basanovic@exeter.ac.uk] suggested: Eni Becker - https://www.ru.nl/en/people/becker-e , Julian Basanovic [j.basanovic@exeter.ac.uk] suggested: Any member of the ACBM association - https://acbm-association.org/directory/ , Felix Würtz [felix.wuertz@rub.de] suggested: Jonas Everaert, J.Everaert@tilburguniversity.edu , Felix Würtz [felix.wuertz@rub.de] suggested: Fanny Dietel, fanny.dietel@uni-osnabrueck.de, Lynn Mobach suggested: Reinout Wiers - r.w.wiers@gmail.com , Lynn Mobach suggested: Elske Salemink - e.salemink@uu.nl No need for them to be recommenders of PCI Registered Reports. Please do not suggest reviewers for whom there might be a conflict of interest. Reviewers are not allowed to review preprints written by close colleagues (with whom they have published in the last four years, with whom they have received joint funding in the last four years, or with whom they are currently writing a manuscript, or submitting a grant proposal), or by family members, friends, or anyone for whom bias might affect the nature of the review - see the code of conduct

2023-09-15 19:25:47

Thomas Meyer