Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2014
Randomized Controlled TrialHypervigilance and avoidance in visual attention in children with social phobia.
Attentional bias towards threat in socially anxious adults is well documented; however, research on this bias in children with social phobia is rather scarce. The present study investigates whether the hypervigilance-avoidance hypothesis also applies to children with social phobia. ⋯ Cognitive biases in elementary school children (between 8 and 12 years) relate to hypervigilant rather than to avoidant information processing. Attentional distribution varies over time. Differences between clinical anxious and healthy children seem to be modified by anxiety induction, symptom severity and contextual stimuli, such as the emotional valence of a face and the context in which the threat stimulus appears.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2014
Implicit versus explicit measures of self-concept of self-control and their differential predictive power for spontaneous trait-relevant behaviors.
Low trait self-control constitutes a core criterion in various psychiatric disorders. Personality traits such as low self-control are mostly indexed by self-report measures. However, several theorists emphasized the importance of differentiating between explicit and implicit indices of personality traits, Therefore, the present study examined the unique predictive validity of an implicit measure of trait self-control for spontaneous dysfunctional behavior. ⋯ As predicted, the implicit measure of trait self-control showed superior predictive power for spontaneous trait-related behavior. This finding points to the relevance of complementing the routinely used self-report measures with implicit measures of trait self-control.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2014
Attention bias for chocolate increases chocolate consumption--an attention bias modification study.
The current study examined experimentally whether a manipulated attention bias for food cues increases craving, chocolate intake and motivation to search for hidden chocolates. ⋯ These findings demonstrate further evidence for a link between attention for food and food intake, and provide an indication about the direction of this relationship.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2014
Difficulty in disengaging attention from threatening facial expressions in anxiety: a new approach in terms of benefits.
Recent work suggests that the ability to disengage attention from threatening information is impaired in anxiety. The present study compared the difficulty to disengage from angry, fearful and neutral faces in Low Trait Anxious individuals (LTA) versus High Trait Anxious individuals (HTA) at two stages of facial expression processing (i.e., initial and later face processing). ⋯ LTA individuals can benefit from the emotional processing (i.e., from 200 to 500 ms) to make a rapid attentional shift and engagement to the target stimuli whereas HTA individuals did not and continue to process the threatening facial expression. These results also point out the role of top down processes on the regulation of disengagement from threatening information in anxiety.
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2014
Memory biases in remitted depression: the role of negative cognitions at explicit and automatic processing levels.
Cognitive models propose that depression is caused by dysfunctional schemas that endure beyond the depressive episode, representing vulnerability factors for recurrence. However, research testing negative cognitions linked to dysfunctional schemas in formerly depressed individuals is still scarce. Furthermore, negative cognitions are presumed to be linked to biases in recalling negative self-referent information in formerly depressed individuals, but no studies have directly tested this association. In the present study, we evaluated differences between formerly and never-depressed individuals in several experimental indices of negative cognitions and their associations with the recall of emotional self-referent material. ⋯ Our findings provide evidence of negative cognitions in formerly depressed individuals at both automatic and explicit levels of processing that may confer a cognitive vulnerability to depression.