General introduction
depression, Depression, ABM, anxiety
DISORDERS
Depression and anxiety disorders are highly prevalent worldwide (Steel et al., Importantly, novel approaches conveying the use of precise knowledge on neurocognitive mechanisms of stress and emotional dysfunctions have been developed in recent years (see, for instance, Goodwin et al., These attentional and interpretation biases are interrelated (Everaert et al., Relatedly, recent research has shown that during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, a clearly major stressful situation, interpretation and attention biases had a large impact on psychological adjustment to the situation (Blanco et al., During the last two decades, a growing body of research under the umbrella term of attention bias modification (ABM) has emerged, developing procedures to train and modify attention biases related to emotional dysfunctions (Koster et al., A particularly promising approach is the (eye)gaze-contingent feedback training (ECAT; Sanchez et al., Using this ECAT, it has been found that, in comparison with the control group, the training group showed less attention bias (AB) to negative information (measured by independent dot-probe and eye-tracking tasks) and that AB changes led to improvements in participants’ reappraisal abilities, to reductions in state rumination, and ultimately to fewer negative emotions during an emotion regulation task (Sanchez et al., Despite the potential of this training approach, the necessity of advanced eye-tracking techniques for delivery of the ECAT may limit its use as a clinical intervention. Therefore, a new variant of this training, the mouse-based contingent attentional training (MCAT) was developed (Sanchez-Lopez et al., Therefore, the main aim of the present research was to examine the efficacy of a new variant, the Online Contingent Attentional Training (OCAT), developed as a fully accessible online app that can be executed either on computers or on mobile phones. The novel OCAT variant follows the exact same principles used in MCAT and is designed to modify attention and interpretation biases and transfer to improve emotion regulation and emotional symptomatology. Across a series of two proof-of-principle studies, a 10-session version of OCAT was validated, analyzing its transfer effects to the use of emotion regulation strategies (i.e., rumination and reappraisal) and to emotional symptomatology levels (i.e., depression and anxiety). Accumulating research has shown that mechanisms of vulnerability to emotional dysfunctions such as attention and interpretation biases can emerge and contribute to dysfunctions particularly at conditions of major stress (see, for instance, Everaert et al., 