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 = 15,294) study level comparisons were included in the meta-analysis. Overall, alternative ABM designs had a medium effect on changing biases ( = 0.488), and a small, but significant effect on improving clinical outcomes ( = 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.

中文翻译：

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超越修改后的点探测任务：跨领域交替注意偏差修改任务功效的荟萃分析


对疾病相关线索的注意力偏差与许多疾病和健康状况有关，例如焦虑、癌症、吸毒障碍和慢性疼痛。注意偏差修正（ABM）表明，改变注意偏差可以改变相关的情绪过程。 ABM 最常使用改进的点探测任务，该任务因其可靠性和不一致的结果而受到越来越多的批评。因此，本综述的目的是系统地回顾和荟萃分析 ABM 研究中使用的替代任务。我们试图检查替代任务是否显着改变注意力偏差和情绪结果，并严格检查相关样本、任务和干预特征是否调节了这些效应大小。荟萃分析中纳入了 74 项（完成者 = 15,294 项）研究水平比较。总体而言，替代 ABM 设计对改变偏差具有中等影响 (= 0.488)，对改善临床结果具有较小但显着的影响 (= 0.117)。我们发现，与那些没有成功改变偏见的研究相比，这种影响要大得多。在所有任务中，目标参与偏差似乎会导致注意力偏差发生最大的变化。重要的是，我们发现包含凝视偶然性的任务——鼓励参与无偏见的刺激——最有可能改善情绪结果。