Emotion-in-Motion: An ABM Approach that Modifies Attentional Disengagement from, Rather than Attentional Engagement with
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BRIEF REPORT
Emotion‑in‑Motion: An ABM Approach that Modifies Attentional Disengagement from, Rather than Attentional Engagement with, Negative Information Julian Basanovic1 · Lies Notebaert1 · Patrick J. F. Clarke2 · Colin MacLeod1 Accepted: 11 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Background Individuals with heightened anxiety vulnerability demonstrate a bias favouring attention to negative information, and it has been argued that this reflects a difficulty to disengage from negative information. Methods to manipulate attentional bias have demonstrated inconsistent effectiveness, however such methods have not targeted biases in attentional disengagement specifically. A recently developed approach to attentional bias modification, labelled Emotion-in-Motion, has been proposed to result in facilitated attentional disengagement from information. Thus, the present study empirically investigated whether the Emotion-in-Motion task modifies biased attentional disengagement from negative information using eye-movement recordings. Methods Forty-four participants completed the Emotion-in-Motion attention manipulation task under conditions designed to enhance attention (Attend Negative) or attenuate attention (Avoid Negative) to negative information. Biased attentional engagement with, and attentional disengagement from, negative information was examined subsequently. Results Participants in the Avoid Negative condition demonstrated lower levels of biased attentional disengagement from negative information as compared to participants in the Attend Negative condition. No difference in biased attentional engagement with negative information was observed. Conclusions It is concluded that the Emotion-in-Motion task serves to independently manipulate selective attentional disengagement from negative information and may be useful in investigating the specific role of biased attentional disengagement in emotional vulnerability. Keywords Attention · Emotion · Attentional bias · Attentional bias modification
Introduction People who are high in anxiety vulnerability allocate greater selective attention towards emotionally negative information, relative to non-negative information, than do people low in anxiety vulnerability (Bar-Haim et al. 2007; Mogg and Bradley 2005). This anxiety-linked attentional bias to negative information has been demonstrated using a variety of experimental approaches to assess the allocation of * Julian Basanovic [email protected] 1
Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion, School of Psychological Science, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
School of Psychology, Curtin University, Bentley, Australia
2
attention across sets of static stimuli, including measures of latency to respond to attentional probes (Bar-Haim et al. 2007) and measures of eye-movements (Armstrong et al. 2013). In each case, these approaches examine the latency at which individuals move attention toward negative information as
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