Siev Jedidiah, Behar Evelyn, Fortune Meghan R
Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, United States.
Department of Psychology, Hunter College, The City University of New York, New York, NY, United States.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jun 9;11:1057. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01057. eCollection 2020.
Dental anxiety is common and associated with negative outcomes. According to information-processing models, anxiety is maintained by maladaptive patterns of processing threatening information. Furthermore, attention training interventions can reduce anxiety in one session. Fifty-three individuals with high levels of dental anxiety completed a Posner reaction-time task. Participants were randomized to attention training or control using a dot-probe task, and then attentional bias was remeasured using another Posner task. Participants then completed a script-driven imaginal exposure task. Results indicated that individuals high in dental anxiety exhibit threat-relevant attentional bias. There was mixed evidence about the efficacy of attention training. On the one hand, training did not eliminate attentional bias and training condition did not predict distress during the imagery task. On the other hand, cue dependency scores in the control group were higher for dental than neutral cues, but did not differ in the training group. In addition, cue dependency scores for both dental and neutral cues predicted subjective anxiety in anticipation of the imagery task. The mixed results of training are considered in terms of the possibility that it enhanced attentional control, rather than reducing bias.
牙科焦虑症很常见，且与负面结果相关。根据信息加工模型，焦虑通过处理威胁性信息的适应不良模式得以维持。此外，注意力训练干预可以在一次治疗中减轻焦虑。五十三名牙科焦虑程度较高的个体完成了一项波斯纳反应时任务。参与者通过点探测任务被随机分配到注意力训练组或对照组，然后使用另一项波斯纳任务重新测量注意力偏差。参与者随后完成了一个脚本驱动的想象暴露任务。结果表明，牙科焦虑程度高的个体表现出与威胁相关的注意力偏差。关于注意力训练的效果，证据不一。一方面，训练并未消除注意力偏差，且训练条件无法预测想象任务期间的痛苦程度。另一方面，对照组中牙科线索的线索依赖分数高于中性线索，但训练组中两者没有差异。此外，牙科线索和中性线索的线索依赖分数均能预测想象任务预期中的主观焦虑。考虑到训练可能增强了注意力控制而非减少偏差，对训练的混合结果进行了探讨。
