Application of adaptive attentional bias modification training to reduce symptoms of anxiety and neural error signals
Final Report Abstract
In every-day life but also in high functioning, accurate performance is important and thus, errors are monitored by neurocognitive systems and are perceived as aversive by individuals. Error monitoring is studied in psychophysiology using the error-related negativity (ERN), which has been shown to be sensitive to modulations of error importance and inter-individual variations in error-avoidance motivation. Critically, the ERN has been shown to be hyperactive in individuals with high anxiety and related psychiatric disorders and even seems to function as a stable biomarker indicating risk for the development of anxiety. Since it might be assumed, that reduction in the ERN might ultimately result in a reduction of symptoms or risk for anxiety, this has been proposed as a target for the development of specific interventions. Attentional bias modification (ABM) seems to provide a promising approach to this end, since it has been shown to be effective in reducing symptoms of anxiety, but has also been used in one previous ERP study, in which a single-session ABM was associated with attenuated ERN amplitudes in a between-groups design. In the current study, a multisession application of an adaptive ABM training was employed to investigate its effectiveness in reducing ERN amplitudes and possibly symptoms of anxiety in healthy individuals. Results indicated that after the extended training, a marked intraindividual reduction of ERN amplitudes was present. Furthermore, an association of this ERN reduction with negative attentional bias scores after the training was observed, whereas negative affective symptoms were not found to be decreased. The present study was thus able to demonstrate that attentional bias modification training can be an effective intervention to decrease ERN amplitudes on an intraindividual level, especially in an extended multi-session application. Further research will be needed to better understand the mechanisms of action encompassed in this intervention and to investigate its effects in clinical populations.
