Intolerance of Uncertainty and Uncertainty-Related Attentional Biases: Evidence of Facilitated Engagement or Disengagement Difficulty?

We first examined the association between intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and a possible uncertainty-related attentional bias, and second tested whether one or more specific attentional processes—facilitated engagement or disengagement difficulty—accounted for the association. Next, we examined whether this attentional bias was specific to IU or if it was attributable to anxiety, depression, or general distress. Students (N = 104) completed questionnaires and a visual search task (VST) with a lexical decision component. For the VST, participants were asked to determine whether a target stimulus that was embedded in a matrix of distracting stimuli was a word or nonword. Results were that IU correlated significantly with facilitated engagement toward, but not with disengagement difficulty from, uncertainty stimuli. IU, particularly the inhibitory dimension, continued to correlate significantly with facilitated engagement after controlling for anxiety, depression, or general distress. Conceptual and therapeutic implications of these results are discussed.