AUTHOR=Baek Soojung , Ha SoSeo , Lee Jang-Han 

TITLE=Application of attentional bias modification to reduce attentional bias and emotional reactivity to stress in mildly depressed individuals

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1273512

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1273512

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=This study aimed to verify the effectiveness of attentional bias modification (ABM) on the attentional bias of depression, appearing in the late stage of attention as a pattern of difficulty in disengagement from depression relevant stimuli, and its effects on emotional reactivity to stress. A total of seventy-eight participants were divided into four groups according to two levels of depression, minimal and mild, and the types of ABM. The positive ABM (pABM) trained participants to disengage their attention from depression-relevant stimuli and induced attention to more positive stimuli; whereas the neutral ABM (nABM) was designed to have no effect. Before and after ABM, the participants performed a free-viewing task by eye tracker to observe changes in attentional bias and then reported their emotional response after a stress-inducing task. The group of mildly depressed participants receiving pABM attended significantly less to depressionrelevant negative affective stimuli and reported significantly decreased negative emotional reactivity to stress compared to the other groups. pABM had an effect on decreasing difficulty in disengaging from depression-relevant negative affective words (DA). Still, it did not increase dwell time on positive affective words (PA) in the current study. This might be due to the short duration of the application of ABM. The current study conducted ABM twice in one day and this might not be enough to increase dwell time on PA. This study verified that the ABM was effectively decreased the attentional bias of depression and its relevant symptom, emotional reactivity to stress.