Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: a meta-analytic study.
This meta-analysis of 172 studies (N = 2,263 anxious,N = 1,768 nonanxious) examined the boundary conditions of threat-related attentional biases in anxiety. Overall, the results show that the bias is reliably demonstrated with different experimental paradigms and under a variety of experimental conditions, but that it is only an effect size of d = 0.45. Although processes requiring conscious perception of threat contribute to the bias, a significant bias is also observed with stimuli outside awareness. The bias is of comparable magnitude across different types of anxious populations (individuals with different clinical disorders, high-anxious nonclinical individuals, anxious children and adults) and is not observed in nonanxious individuals. Empirical and clinical implications as well as future directions for research are discussed.
Bar-Haim
Yair
Y
Adler Center for Reasearch in Child Development and Psychopathology, Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. yair1@post.tau.ac.il
Lamy
Dominique
D
Pergamin
Lee
L
Bakermans-Kranenburg
Marian J
MJ
van IJzendoorn
Marinus H
MH
D001007:Anxiety / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D001767:Blinking; D006801:Humans