Interim discussion
anxiety
Previous research has shown that attention and interpretation biases play a major role in psychological adjustment during COVID-19 lockdown (Blanco et al., Following the results of Study 1, we also hypothesized that training-related improvements in attention and interpretation biases would transfer to improved rumination and anxiety levels. Different to Study 1, groups did not differ in emotion regulation or symptom levels from pre- to post-training. This could be accounted by a larger heterogeneity in the characteristics of the community sample tested in Study 2. Furthermore, the sample of the present study was undergoing a major stressor when starting the study, whereas the sample of Study 1 was anticipating an upcoming stressor. The different results found in each study suggest the possibility that this type of CBM trainings act as stress buffer (Browning et al., In sum, the results of this second study further supported the efficacy of the OCAT procedure to modify both attention and interpretation processing during the occurrence of a major stressor and point out a potential transfer to emotion regulation and symptom levels via cognitive bias modification.