Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2016
ReviewWhat does the facial dot-probe task tell us about attentional processes in social anxiety? A systematic review.
Current models of SAD assume that attentional processes play a pivotal role in the etiology and maintenance of social anxiety disorder. Social anxiety is supposedly associated with an attentional bias towards disorder related stimuli such as threatening faces. Using the facial dot probe task in socially anxious individuals has, however, revealed inconsistent findings. ⋯ Methodologically, combined measures of dot-probe and eye movement measures might be beneficial to detect overt attentional biases. Importantly, our results show that preferential processing of threat cues might guide early attentional processes in social anxiety, depending however on several contextual and situational factors. Clinically, patients with greater severity of SAD may be more prone to such an attentional bias, thus therapists should take this into account when planning behavioral experiments and exposure therapy.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2016
Learned, instructed and observed pathways to fear and avoidance.
Conditioned fear may emerge in the absence of directly experienced conditioned stimulus (CS)--unconditioned stimulus (US) pairings. Here, we compared three pathways by which avoidance of the US may be acquired both directly (i.e., through trial-and-error instrumental learning) and indirectly (i.e., via verbal instructions and social observation). ⋯ Instrumental-, instructed-, and observational-learning pathways of avoidance are similar. Findings may have implications for understanding the etiology of clinical avoidance in anxiety.