What is attention bias variability? Examining the potential roles of attention control and response time variability in its relationship with anxiety

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Highlights

  • Attention bias variability may be underpinned by other cognitive processes.

  • Study examined potential roles of response time variability and attention control.

  • Measures of attention bias variability predicted anxiety symptoms.

  • Attention control mediated this relationship for one bias variability measure.

  • There was no evidence for the mediating role of response time variability.

Abstract

The present study examined the underlying role of attention control and response time variability in explaining the relationship between anxiety and two commonly computed measures of attention bias variability: ‘moving average’ and ‘trial-level bias score’ measures. Participants (final n = 195) completed measures of anxiety symptomatology, antisaccade performance (attention control), a stand-alone measure of response-time variability, and a probe task measure of attention bias. Average bias and moving average bias variability measures both recorded significant, but low split-half reliability. Both attention bias variability measures and average attention bias were associated with anxiety, and attention control. Both attention bias variability measures correlated with response time variability. Neither attention bias variability measure correlated with average attention bias. Attention control was the single significant mediator of the relationship between anxiety and the trial-level bias score measure of attention bias variability. Neither response time variability nor attention control significantly mediated the relationship between anxiety and the moving average measure of attention bias variability. No evidence was found for the mediating role of response time variability. The present findings suggest that the relationships observed between anxiety and the trial-level bias score measure of attention bias variability in particular may be attributable to the over-arching role of attention control.

Section snippets

Participants

The initial sample comprised 258 (182 female, 74 male) undergraduate students and members of the community recruited through undergraduate participant pools at Curtin University and the University of Western Australia, and via social media advertising (Mage = 22.64, SD = 7.21). The project was approved by both University's research ethics committees. All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and

Data preparation

In the preparation of response time data for the probe task assessing attention bias, the following exclusions were applied: individual response times falling below 200 ms or above 2000 ms (3.50% trials), incorrect responses (6.84% trials) and response times falling further than 3 median absolute deviations (MAD; Leys, Ley, Klein, Bernard, & Licata, 2013) from each participant's average response time for each trial type (2.41% trials). These same criteria were applied to the RT-Var probe

Discussion

The current study sought to examine whether response time variability and/or attention control underpin the relationship between measures of attention bias variability and anxiety using two consistently employed approaches to the computation of attention bias variability. Reliability data indicated that AB-VARTLBS showed moderate split-half reliability, while both AB-VARTLBS, and AB-Ave showed significant, though low reliability. Both measures of AB-Var and the standard AB-Ave index showed

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Patrick J.F. Clarke: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Writing. Welber Marinovic: Software, Data curation, Writing - review & editing. Jemma Todd: Writing - review & editing, Formal analysis. Julian Basanovic: Writing - review & editing, Formal analysis. Nigel T.M. Chen: Writing - review & editing, Formal analysis. Lies Notebaert: Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors report no financial interests or potential conflicts of interest. The authors received no funding from an external source for the completion of this research.

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