• Bram Van Bockstaele, Lies Notebaert, Colin MacLeod, Elske Salemink, Patrick J F Clarke, Bruno Verschuere, Susan M Bögels, and Reinout W Wiers.
• Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 129-B, 1018 WT, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Department of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 127, 1018 WS, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Electronic address: Bram.Vanbockstaele@gmail.com.
• J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2019 Mar 1; 62: 38-48.

Background And ObjectivesIn 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.MethodsUsing 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.ResultsIn 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.LimitationsWe 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.ConclusionsBy 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.Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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