Attentional bias for threat: Crisis or opportunity?

Abstract

Beginning in the 1980s, experimental psychopathologists increasingly adapted the concepts and paradigms of cognitive science to elucidate information-processing abnormalities that may figure in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Assessment and modification of attentional biases for threat has been a major theme in this research program. The field has witnessed the development of progressively more sophisticated approaches for isolating attentional processes from other cognitive processes in the service of accurate assessment and treatment. Yet the field is now in crisis as foundational concerns about the reliability of basic measures of attentional bias for threat (ABT) have emerged. Moreover, recent research points to theoretical revisions deemphasizing ABT as a stable, near-universal feature of anxiety disorders, and stressing deficits in executive control as the primary attentional problem linked to anxiety.