Three Indirect Tasks Assessing Implicit Threat Associations and Behavioral Response Tendencies
Test-Retest Reliability and Validity
Abstract
Anxiety disorders are characterized by biased implicit threat associations, which can be measured by indirect reaction time tasks. These tasks might provide a useful tool in the assessment of individual diagnoses and therapeutic changes. However, sufficient psychometric properties of the applied tasks are a prerequisite for these applications. Therefore, we comparatively investigated the reliability and validity of an Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST), an Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT), and an Affective Priming Task (APT) by presenting the same tasks twice within 1 week. Data show retest reliabilities of around r = .42 for the EAST, r = .35 for the AAT, and r = .63 for the APT. Internal consistencies varied between .44 and .49 for the EAST, .66 and .70 for the AAT, and .53 and .76 for the APT. Validity correlations with self-report questionnaires ranged between r = .43 and r = .59, being lowest for the EAST and highest for the AAT. We argue that while these instruments might not be applicable to individual diagnostics yet, they are sufficiently reliable and valid to be used in the assessment of group differences.
References
1954). Technical recommendations for psychological tests and diagnostic techniques. Washington, DC: APA.
. (1999). Automatic evaluation of self and significant others: Affective Priming in close relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 16, 803–821.
(1985). Anxiety disorders and phobias: A cognitive perspective. New York: Basic Books.
(2008). The mood-induced activation of implicit alcohol cognition in enhancement and coping motivated drinkers. Addictive Behaviors, 33, 565–581.
(2000). Stalking the perfect measure of implicit self-esteem: The blind men and the elephant revisited?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 631–643.
(1984). Assessment of fear of fear in agoraphobics: The body sensations questionnaire and the agoraphobic cognitions questionnaire. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 52, 1090–1097.
(2002). Memory biases in the anxiety disorders: Current status. Clinical Psychology Review, 22, 587–627.
(2001). Implicit attitude measures: Consistency, stability, and convergent validity. Psychological Science, 12, 163–170.
(2003). The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task. Experimental Psychology, 50, 77–85.
(2007). The implicit association test outperforms the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task as an implicit measure of inter-individual differences in attitudes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 46, 401–421.
(2002). Affective priming of semantic categorization responses. Cognition and Emotion, 16, 643–666.
(2001). A reaction time paradigm to assess (implicit) complaint-specific dysfunctional beliefs. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39, 101–113.
(2007). Using the extrinsic affective Simon test as a measure of implicit attitudes towards alcohol: Relationship with drinking behaviour and alcohol problems. Addictive Behavior, 32, 881–887.
(1993). Fragebogen zu körperbezogenen Ängsten, Kognitionen und Vermeidung (AKV). Weinheim: Beltz.
(2005). Activation and measurement of threat associations in fear of spiders: An application of the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task. Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 36, 281–299.
(2006). From fear to love: Implicit and explicit associations towards spiders. Emotion, 6, 18–27.
(1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 229–238.
(2005). A pictorial version of the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task: Sensitivity to generally affective and phobia-relevant stimuli in high and low spider fearful individuals. Experimental Psychology, 52, 289–295.
(2009). Implicit and explicit attitudes toward spiders: Sensitivity to treatment and predictive value for generalization of treatment effects. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 33, 211–220.
(2001). The reliability of implicit stereotyping. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 212–225.
(1997). Fragebogen zur Depressionsdiagnostik nach DSM-IV (FDD-DSM-IV). Göttingen, Germany: Hogrefe.
(in press ). Faking on direct, indirect, and behavioural measures of spider fear: Can you get away with it?. Cognition and Emotion.1981). STAI: Das State-Trait-Angstinventar. Weinheim, Germany: Beltz.
(1996). The emotional brain. New York: Simon & Schuster.
(2005). Cognitive vulnerability to emotional disorders. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 1, 167–195.
(1993). Fear and anxiety as emotional phenomena. In , Handbook of emotions. New York: Guilford Press.
(2006). Spiders crawl easily through the bottleneck: Visual working memory for negative stimuli. Emotion, 6, 438–449.
(2008). How preferential is the preferential encoding of threatening stimuli? Working memory biases in specific anxiety and the attentional blink. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22, 655–670.
(2007). Approach and avoidance in fear of spiders. Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 38, 105–120.
(2002). Reliability and validity of German versions of three instruments measuring fear of spiders. Diagnostica, 48, 141–149.
(1995). Fear of spiders questionnaire. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 26, 31–34.
(2003). Automatic processing in spider phobia: Implicit fear associations over the course of treatment. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 112, 100–109.
(2004). Assessment of multiple implicit self-concept dimensions using the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST). European Journal of Personality, 18, 495–520.
(1986). A self-report scale to diagnose major depressive disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 43, 1076–1081.
(