ArticleJournal of abnormal psychology2016
Unreliability as a threat to understanding psychopathology: The cautionary tale of attentional bias.
Article in Journal of abnormal psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 120 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
120 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Attention to threat in posttraumatic stress disorder as indexed by eye-tracking indices: a systematic review.Psychological medicine · 2019Pooled it
- Positive Affect Treatment for Depression, Anxiety, and Low Positive Affect: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2026Trial
- Amplification of Positivity Treatment for Anxiety and Depression: A Randomized Experimental Therapeutics Trial Targeting Social Reward Sensitivity to Enhance Social Connectedness.Biological psychiatry · 2024Trial
- Integrating cognitive bias modification for pain and opioid cues into medication for opioid use disorder clinical care: Feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary results.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2023Trial
- Effects of attention bias modification for anxiety: Neurophysiological indices and moderation by symptom severity.Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2023Trial
- Trial
- Cognitive control training for urgency: A pilot randomized controlled trial in an acute clinical sample.Behaviour research and therapy · 2021Trial
- Repeated measurement of implicit self-associations in clinical depression: Psychometric, neural, and computational properties.Journal of abnormal psychology · 2021Trial
- Does alcohol cue inhibitory control training survive a context shift?Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors · 2020Trial
- Computational Modeling Applied to the Dot-Probe Task Yields Improved Reliability and Mechanistic Insights.Biological psychiatry · 2019Trial
- Biobehavioral Markers of Attention Bias Modification in Temperamental Risk for Anxiety: A Randomized Control Trial.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2018Trial
- Attention bias modification reduces neural correlates of response monitoring.Biological psychology · 2017Trial
- Reliability of computational versus noncomputational metrics of working memory and episodic memory in serious mental illness.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2026Article
- Dimensions of Early-Life Adversity and Attention Biases in Childhood and Adolescence: A Systematic Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2026Review
- No association of childhood maltreatment experiences and attention to facial emotions in men.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Transactional relations between attentional biases for affective stimuli and depressive symptoms in offspring of mothers with and without major depressive disorder.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2026Article
- Fronto-Parietal EEG asymmetry interactions predict negative attention bias: A secondary data analysis.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Measuring implicit bias in height-fearful participants with the Approach-Avoidance Task.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2026Article
- Attentional bias for alcohol-related cues in a clinical setting among patients with alcohol use disorder: Evidence from eye movements and reaction times.Drug and alcohol dependence reports · 2026Article
- The talking heads attentional bias assessment task: A readily available, reliable, and effective task for assessing attentional bias.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
60 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The use of unreliable measures constitutes a threat to our understanding of psychopathology, because advancement of science using both behavioral and biologically oriented measures can only be certain if such measurements are reliable. Two pillars of the National Institute of Mental Health's portfolio-the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative for psychopathology and the target engagement initiative in clinical trials-cannot succeed without measures that possess the high reliability necessary for tests involving mediation and selection based on individual differences. We focus on the historical lack of reliability of attentional bias measures as an illustration of how reliability can pose a threat to our understanding. Our own data replicate previous findings of poor reliability for traditionally used scores, which suggests a serious problem with the ability to test theories regarding attentional bias. This lack of reliability may also suggest problems with the assumption (in both theory and the formula for the scores) that attentional bias is consistent and stable across time. In contrast, measures accounting for attention as a dynamic process in time show good reliability in our data. The field is sorely in need of research reporting findings and reliability for attentional bias scores using multiple methods, including those focusing on dynamic processes over time. We urge researchers to test and report reliability of all measures, considering findings of low reliability not just as a nuisance but as an opportunity to modify and improve upon the underlying theory. Full assessment of reliability of measures will maximize the possibility that RDoC (and psychological science more generally) will succeed. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.