The Efficacy of Attentional Bias Modification for Anxiety: A Registered Replication

Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) is a prevalent condition that has been linked to the presence of certain cognitive biases, including attention bias. Attention bias is the tendency to attend preferentially to threat-related stimuli and has been consistently observed in high anxious samples. Naturally, interventions aiming to modify these biases have been developed with the hopes of alleviating anxiety symptoms. However, while initial studies were promising, over time the reported efficacy of these attention bias modification (ABM) procedures in alleviating symptoms has become mixed, with some studies reporting moderate to large effect sizes, and others reporting non-significant effects. Furthermore, concerns have been raised regarding the potential for demand effects to be underlying previous significant findings. Therefore, we revisit the efficacy of ABM as a method for alleviating both attention bias, and in turn anxiety symptomology. As our primary objective we seek to conduct a direct replication of one of the seminal studies showing successful alleviation of anxiety symptoms using multi-session ABM training (Hazen et al., 2009), while adopting a Bayesian approach to analyses. As a secondary goal, we aim to quantify the potential influence of demand effects in the paradigm.