Abstract
Self-reported measurements of attentional bias are possibly influenced by social desirability, conscious awareness, or introspection. This study developed a visual dot-probe task to study the relationship between attentional bias and posttraumatic stress disorder among women with breast cancer. Fifty six women with breast cancer were presented with a series of face pairs, which were equally divided into positive-neutral and negative-neutral pairs. One face pair was shown for each trial, which consisted of the neutral and emotional versions of the same face displaying side-toside. Participants’ goal was to detect a small dot displayed on the screen after disappearance of the faces as quickly as possible in 80 trials. Negative/positive attentional bias was the mean latency to detect probes appearing on the side of neutral faces minus that of negative/positive faces. We investigated the relationships between the dot-probe task and the Chinese Impact of Event Scale (CIES-R) and demographic variables. Negative attentional bias as measured by the dot-probe task was positively correlated with the CIES-R total score ( r = 0.30, p< 0.05), the hyperarousal subscale (r = 0.32, p< 0.05), and the intrusions subscale ( r = 0.30, p< 0.05) but not the avoidance subscale ( r = 0.32, p = 0.14). This study has demonstrated that measuring attentional bias with a dot-probe task is possible. The dot-probe task may provide an alternative measurement to self-reported measurements and important information for psychotherapies. Future studies may examine the predictive values of the dot-probe task on treatment outcomes and the risk for developing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Highlights
A previous study has shown that breast cancer women with a cognitive style of selfreported negative attentional bias and ruminative cognitive processing were related to the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)(Chan, Ho, Tedeschi, & Leung, 2011)
The primary objective of the present study was to use experimental measures of cognitive biases to investigate the relationship of response-based attentional bias to negative stimuli and positive stimuli with psychopathology in women with breast cancer
Results of the dot-probe task showed breast cancer patients with greater negative attentional bias tended to report more symptoms of PTSD. This finding was consistent with the results of a previous study, in which self-reports of attentional bias towards negative information was associated with psychopathology(Chan, et al, 2011)
Summary
A previous study has shown that breast cancer women with a cognitive style of selfreported negative attentional bias and ruminative cognitive processing were related to the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)(Chan, Ho, Tedeschi, & Leung, 2011). The use of self-reports in that study may subject to both social desirability effect and biases due to respondent’s conscious awareness and introspection(Jansen, Nederkoorn, & Mulkens, 2005). Such subjective reports may not entirely capture the cognitive processes that predict posttraumatic responses. MacLeod, Mathews and Tata (1986)designed the dot-probe paradigm. In this task, two stimuli, one threat-related and one neutral, are shown briefly on each trial, followed by a small probe which replaces one of the stimuli. In the dot-probe paradigm, the neutral and threat-related pictures compete for the participants’ attention
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