Elizabeth Rutherford Memorial Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion, School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia; email:
Annu Rev Clin Psychol. 2019 May 7;15:529-554. doi: 10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-050718-095505. Epub 2019 Jan 16.
There is substantial evidence that heightened anxiety vulnerability is characterized by increased selective attention to threatening information. The reliability of this anxiety-linked attentional bias has become the focus of considerable recent interest. We distinguish between the potential inconsistency of anxiety-linked attentional bias and inconsistency potentially reflecting the psychometric properties of the assessment approaches used to measure it. Though groups with heightened anxiety vulnerability often exhibit, on average, elevated attention to threat, the evidence suggests that individuals are unlikely to each display a stable, invariant attentional bias to threat. Moreover, although existing assessment approaches can differentiate between groups, they do not exhibit the internal consistency or test-retest reliability necessary to classify individuals in terms of their characteristic pattern of attentional responding to threat. We discuss the appropriate uses of existing attentional bias assessment tasks and propose strategies for enhancing classification of individuals in terms of their tendency to display an attentional bias to threat.
有大量证据表明，焦虑易感性增强的特征是对威胁信息的选择性注意增加。这种与焦虑相关的注意力偏差的可靠性已成为最近相当多关注的焦点。我们区分了与焦虑相关的注意力偏差的潜在不一致性和可能反映用于测量它的评估方法的心理测量特性的不一致性。尽管焦虑易感性增强的群体通常表现出对威胁的平均注意力升高，但有证据表明，个体不太可能对威胁表现出稳定、不变的注意力偏差。此外，尽管现有的评估方法可以区分群体，但它们没有表现出必要的内部一致性或重测信度，无法根据个体对威胁的注意力反应模式对其进行分类。我们讨论了现有注意力偏差评估任务的适当用途，并提出了根据个体表现出对威胁的注意力偏差的倾向对其进行分类的策略。
