Attentional Bias

Attentional bias is the tendency for a person's perception to be disproportionately influenced by recurring thoughts, particularly by information or stimuli that are emotionally salient, threatening or otherwise personally significant to them, at the expense of attending accurately to other available information. The effect has been studied extensively using experimental tasks such as the emotional Stroop task and the dot-probe task, which measure how quickly attention is captured by or held on threat-related or emotionally charged stimuli compared with neutral ones. Attentional bias toward threat-related cues is particularly well documented in anxiety disorders and addiction research, where it is treated both as a marker of the underlying condition and, in some clinical programs, as a target for attention-bias modification training intended to reduce the bias itself.