Beyond the modified dot-probe task: A meta-analysis of the efficacy of alternate attention bias modification tasks across domains

Tessa Rooney; Louise Sharpe; Jemma Todd; Stefan Carlo Michalski; Dimitri Van Ryckeghem; Geert Crombez; Ben Colagiuri

doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102436

Beyond the modified dot-probe task: A meta-analysis of the efficacy of alternate attention bias modification tasks across domains

Clin Psychol Rev. 2024 Apr 27:110:102436. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102436. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Tessa Rooney¹, Louise Sharpe², Jemma Todd², Stefan Carlo Michalski³, Dimitri Van Ryckeghem⁴, Geert Crombez⁵, Ben Colagiuri²

Affiliations

¹ School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, The University of Sydney, Australia. Electronic address: tessa.rooney@sydney.edu.au.
² School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, The University of Sydney, Australia.
³ Department of Developmental Disability Neuropsychiatry, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of New South Wales, Australia.
⁴ Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium; Department of Clinical Psychological Science, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands; Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.
⁵ Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.

PMID: 38696911
DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102436

Abstract

Attention biases towards disease-relevant cues have been implicated in numerous disorders and health conditions, such as anxiety, cancer, drug-use disorders, and chronic pain. Attention bias modification (ABM) has shown that changing attention biases can change related emotional processes. ABM most commonly uses a modified dot-probe task, which has received increasing criticism regarding its reliability and inconsistent findings. The purpose of the present review was thus to systematically review and meta-analyse alternative tasks used in ABM research. We sought to examine whether alternative tasks significantly changed attention biases and emotional outcomes, and critically examined whether relevant sample, task and intervention characteristics moderated each of these effect sizes. Seventy-four (completer n = 15,294) study level comparisons were included in the meta-analysis. Overall, alternative ABM designs had a medium effect on changing biases (g = 0.488), and a small, but significant effect on improving clinical outcomes (g = 0.117). We found this effect to be significantly larger for studies which successfully changed biases compared to those that did not. Across all tasks, it appeared that targeting engagement biases results in the largest change to attention biases. Importantly, we found tasks incorporating gaze-contingency - encouraging engagement with non-biased stimuli - show the most promise for improving emotional outcomes.

Keywords: Anxiety; Attention bias; Attention bias modification; Depression; Novel task.

Publication types

Review