Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2021
Will that hurt? A contingency learning task to assess pain-expectancy judgments for low back postures.
Contingency learning, i.e. learning that a cue predicts the presence (or absence) of an event, is central to the formation of beliefs regarding painfulness of body postures. Such beliefs may spread to safe cues due to compromised learning (e.g., excessive generalization, impaired safety learning), prompting avoidance and leading to disability. Despite its importance, compromised learning about low back pain is underinvestigated. We propose a low back pain scenario contingency learning task for the investigation of back pain-related learning. ⋯ This task is an easily applicable, non-invasive way to investigate the formation of back pain-related threat beliefs.
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Nocebo hyperalgesia (i.e., increased pain sensitivity based on expectations) can be induced by conditioning, but is supposed to be mediated by conscious expectation. Although recent evidence points to the feasibility of subliminal conditioning of nocebo hyperalgesia with masked faces, face processing might be a special case and the practical implications of subliminal conditioning remain questionable. This study aimed to implicitly condition nocebo hyperalgesia using supraliminal cues. ⋯ The results support the notion that implicit conditioning of nocebo hypoalgesia is feasible using a novel experimental conditioning design with supraliminal stimulus presentation, although further research is needed. So far, implicitly conditioned nocebo effects might have been underestimated despite vast clinical implications.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2019
The effects of attentional bias modification on emotion regulation.
In 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. ⋯ By 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.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2017
Brief time course of trait anxiety-related attentional bias to fear-conditioned stimuli: Evidence from the dual-RSVP task.
Attentional bias to threat is a much-studied feature of anxiety; it is typically assessed using response time (RT) tasks such as the dot probe. Findings regarding the time course of attentional bias have been inconsistent, possibly because RT tasks are sensitive to processes downstream of attention. ⋯ The results of studies using response time to assess the time course of attentional bias may partially reflect later processes such as decision making and response preparation. This may limit the efficacy of therapies aiming to retrain attentional biases using response time tasks.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2017
Biases in attention, interpretation, memory, and associations in children with varying levels of spider fear: Inter-relations and prediction of behavior.
Cognitive theories suggest that cognitive biases may be related and together influence the anxiety response. However, little is known about the interrelations of cognitive bias tasks and whether they allow for an improved prediction of fear-related behavior in addition to self-reports. This study simultaneously addressed several types of cognitive biases in children, to investigate attention bias, interpretation bias, memory bias and fear-related associations, their interrelations and the prediction of behavior. ⋯ This is the first study to find evidence that different cognitive biases each predict unique variance in avoidance behavior. Furthermore, it is also the first study in which we found evidence for a relation between fear of spiders and size and distance indication. We showed that this bias is distinct from other cognitive biases.