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