Skvarc David, Hyder Shannon, Leary Laetitia, Watts Shahni, Seecamp Marcus, Burns Lewis, Hayley Alexa
School of Psychology, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC 3216, Australia.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2025 Aug 3;15(8):1052. doi: 10.3390/bs15081052.
Psychological distress is understood to be maintained by attention. We performed two experiments examining the impact of attention training (AT) on psychological distress symptoms. ( = 336) investigated what effects might be detected in a simple experimental design with longitudinal measurements, while ( = 214) examined whether using a different emotional stimulus could induce an immediate anxiolytic effect in response to AT. Attentional biases were operationalized as the target search latency correlated with mood and psychological distress scores. While limited evidence of attentional biases was found in participants with higher mood distress, correlations emerged in the experimental conditions at day thirty, indicating a relationship between task latency, stress, and changes in depression (experimental one). We found no immediate between-within-group differences in outcome when including different emotional stimuli (experiment two). Despite attentional biases being less apparent in community samples, attentional training for bias modification was effective in eliciting positive biases, leading to improved mood. Notably, participants in the control condition reported the greatest mood and psychological distress improvements, whereas changes in the experimental condition primarily pertained to attentional biases. Taken together, these findings suggest that AT tasks can improve distress, but not through changes in attentional biases.
心理困扰被认为是由注意力维持的。我们进行了两项实验，研究注意力训练（AT）对心理困扰症状的影响。（N = 336）在一个具有纵向测量的简单实验设计中研究了可能检测到的影响，而（N = 214）则研究了使用不同的情绪刺激是否能在AT后立即产生抗焦虑作用。注意力偏差被定义为与情绪和心理困扰评分相关的目标搜索潜伏期。虽然在情绪困扰较高的参与者中发现的注意力偏差证据有限，但在第30天的实验条件下出现了相关性，表明任务潜伏期、压力和抑郁变化之间存在关系（实验一）。当纳入不同的情绪刺激时（实验二），我们没有发现组间和组内结果的即时差异。尽管在社区样本中注意力偏差不太明显，但针对偏差修正的注意力训练在引发积极偏差方面是有效的，从而改善了情绪。值得注意的是，对照组的参与者报告情绪和心理困扰改善最大，而实验条件下的变化主要与注意力偏差有关。综上所述，这些发现表明，AT任务可以改善困扰，但不是通过注意力偏差的变化来实现。
