Cutting stress off at the pass: reducing vigilance and responsiveness to social threat by manipulating attention

In the citing paper

“For example, training individuals to withdraw their attention from stress-triggering social cues (e.g., pictures of frowning faces) and to orient it toward emotionally comforting social cues (e.g., pictures of smiling faces) was found to scale down physiological and self-reported stress levels (Dandeneau, Baldwin, Baccus, Sakellaropoulo, & Pruessner, 2007).”

In the citing paper

“Interventions on vigilance rely on the principle that withdrawing one’s attention from cues that elicit specific responses can scale down those responses.”

In the citing paper

“Lack of consensus regarding why conventional ABM threat-avoidance training has inconsistent effects (discussed earlier) has encouraged the development of various alternative methods which have preliminary data suggesting efficacy”

In the citing paper

“Preliminary nonclinical studies report short-term positive effects (e.g., reduced stress reactivity after singlesession training) with several methods (A-FACT, gamified ABM, person-identity matching, emotional face visual search training) [18,20,68,70].”

In the citing paper

“Evidence for the therapeutic efficacy of alternative ABM training methods is limited.”

In the citing paper

“In most ABM training methods, nonthreat targets are more likely to appear in different locations [ 5 0 8 _ T D $ D I F F ] from threat cues, which encourages attention-orienting away from threat.”

In the citing paper

“However, a previous study comparing the VS and VS placebo training to an exposure-control condition showed that training effects could not be attributed to mere exposure (Dandeneau et al., 2007).”

In the citing paper

“This meta-analysis indicated that symptom-improvement effect sizes of several comparisons which used ABM-positive-search training were larger than the average effect size of the whole dataset (Dandeneau et al., 2007; Study 3a and 3b; Waters et al., 2013).”

In the citing paper

“Regarding effects of ABM-positive-search training on AB, most studies found changes in AB measures for threat and positive stimuli, although these changes varied across studies.”

In the citing paper

“ABMpositive-search training reduced ABs to threat on modified Stroop and visual-probe tasks in individuals with low self-esteem (Dandeneau et al., 2007)”

In the citing paper

“Findings from these studies indicate that ABM-positive-search training reduces self-reported stress and cortisol measures of stress reactivity in adults (Dandeneau et al., 2007), social anxiety symptoms in youth (De Voogd et al., 2014) and clinician-rated symptom severity of anxiety disorders in children (Waters et al., 2013(Waters et al., , 2015(Waters et al., , 2016)).”