Attention Bias Modification Treatment: A meta-analysis towards the establishment of novel treatment for anxiety

By Y. Hakamata, Shmuel Lissek, Yair Bar-Haim, Jennifer C. Britton, Nick C Fox, Ellen Leibenluft, Monique Ernst, Daniel S. Pine. Biological Psychiatry, 2010

890 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Attention Bias Modification Treatment (ABMT) is a newly-emerging promising treatment for anxiety disorders. While recent randomized control trials (RCTs) suggest that ABMT reduces anxiety, therapeutic effects have not been summarized quantitatively. Methods Standard meta-analytic procedures were used to summarize the effect of ABMT on anxiety. Using MEDLINE, January 1995 to February 2010, we identified RCTs comparing the effects on anxiety of ABMT and quantified effect sizes using Hedge’s d. Results Twelve studies met inclusion criteria, including 467 participants from 10 publications. ABMT produced significantly greater reductions in anxiety than control training, with a medium effect (d = 0.61, p <.001). Age and gender did not moderate the effect of ABMT on anxiety, while several characteristics of the ABMT training did. Conclusions ABMT shows promise as a novel treatment for anxiety. Additional RCTs are needed to fully evaluate the degree to which these findings replicate and apply to patients. Future work should consider the precise role for ABMT in the broader anxiety-disorder therapeutic armamentarium.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Pharmacology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4eace0c1355ded852a1a6cac9a70897eac3af37c

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Citations in the corpus

Attention Bias Modification Training Via Smartphone to Reduce Social Anxiety: A Randomized, Controlled Multi-Session Experiment (2014, neutral): “Researchers have conducted randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to test the efficacy of multisession CBM-A training for reducing anxiety, reporting mixed results (for meta-analytic findings, see Beard et al. 2012; Hakamata et al. 2010, 2012; Hallion and Ruscio 2011).”
What we fear most: A developmental advantage for threat-relevant stimuli (2013, methodology): “A recent meta-analysis on published research using this treatment procedure showed that training participants to ignore threatening stimuli is effective in significantly reducing anxiety in clinical populations (Hakamata et al., 2010).”
Internet-Based Attention Training for Social Anxiety: A Randomized Controlled Trial (2012, background): “However, Hakamata et al. (2010) failed to identify age as moderator variable in attention modification trials.”
Cognitive bias modification approaches to anxiety. (2012, background): “The majority of attentional bias modification studies to date have employed variants of this probe CBM-A approach, and its capacity to modify attentional selectivity is now well established (cf. Hakamata et al. 2010).”