Interim discussion
depressive, anxiety
The aim of this first pilot study was to analyze the efficacy of OCAT on targeting attention and interpretation biases as well as its transfer effects to emotion regulation and emotional symptom levels in an unselected sample of undergraduate students who were about to confront a naturalistic stressor (i.e., beginning of final exams). Our results partially supported our hypotheses.First, we hypothesized that, after the training, participants in the OCAT group would show a larger attentional processing of positive information than their counterparts in the control group. Our results revealed that, after the training, there were no differences between groups in the time they spent attending towards positive and negative information. However, analyses of specific patterns of change showed that participants in the OCAT group specifically decreased their attention to negative information to a larger extent than participants in the control group. Previous research has shown that the relation of attention biases towards negative information and emotional symptomatology follows a gradient (e.g., higher negative attention bias, higher depressive symptomatology—see Blanco et al., In terms of transfer to emotion regulation, our hypotheses stated that, after the training, OCAT participants (in comparison to the control participants) would report lower use of rumination, and higher use of reappraisal. Our results revealed that OCAT group indeed showed a significant reduction of brooding rumination after training. This result is in line with previous evidence found using the eye-tracking and computer-based variants of this training (see Sanchez et al., Regarding transfer effects to emotional symptoms, in line with our prediction, there were group differences after training in levels of anxiety in the face of naturalistic stress. The control group showed a significant increase of their levels of anxiety from Time 1 to Time 2, whereas these patterns of increased symptom levels in the face of naturalistic stress were absent in the training group. Previous experimental research has proposed that attention bias modification paradigms could act as a vaccine against stressful situations (Browning et al., In sum, the results of this first study show preliminary evidence regarding the efficacy of the OCAT procedure to modify specific components of attention (i.e., total time attending negative information) and interpretation biases. We also observed transfer effects to emotion regulation and symptom levels under stress conditions. In a second study we sought to replicate these findings and to extend them when considering OCAT efficacy for individuals from the general population in the face of a major stressor.