ArticleClinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2025
No Evidence of Reliability Across 36 Variations of the Emotional Dot-Probe Task in 9,600 Participants.
Article in Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Food-Related Attentional Biases in Restrained Eaters: A Meta-Analysis.The International journal of eating disorders · 2026Pooled it
- Cognitive and neuropsychological correlates of the attention training technique: a systematic review and evidence synthesis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Pooled it
- Does Attentional Bias Predict Relapse in Addiction? A Systematic Review of Longitudinal Studies.Brain and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- Gamified Attention Bias Modification Training to Augment Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Youth Anxiety Disorders: A Randomized Controlled Trial.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2026Trial
- Trial
- The relationship between attentional bias and posttraumatic stress symptoms among bereaved parents: a three-year longitudinal study using linear mixed models.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- Modality-specific attentional biases to facial vs. vocal emotions.Psychological research · 2026Article
- No association of childhood maltreatment experiences and attention to facial emotions in men.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Fronto-Parietal EEG asymmetry interactions predict negative attention bias: A secondary data analysis.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- The talking heads attentional bias assessment task: A readily available, reliable, and effective task for assessing attentional bias.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Aversive responses to stereotypic science and math-based (STEM) images predict women's long-term STEM memories and underperformance in math.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Developmental stability of task-rest neural efficiency in youth using a threat and cognitive control task.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Many labels, shared threat processes: classifying domain-labelled anxieties by mechanism rather than context.Psychoradiology · 2026Review
- The effects of competitive trait anxiety on attentional bias in adolescent tennis players.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Attentional bias toward food in binge eating disorder: baseline differences and the limits of attention modification training.Journal of eating disorders · 2025Article
- Test-retest reliability and repeatability of behavioral and electrophysiological markers of cognitive control in an Eriksen Flanker Task.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Disentangling Attentional Dynamics in Early Childhood: Response-Based Indicators of Avoidance of and Vigilance to Angry Faces in Relation to Anxiety and Traumatic Stress.Cognitive therapy and research · 2025Article
- Social rejection sensitivity and its role in anorexia nervosa: a systematic review of experimental literature.Journal of eating disorders · 2025Review
- Attentional bias and math avoidance: insights from a developmental sample.Psychological research · 2025Article
- How to Produce, Identify, and Motivate Robust Psychological Science: A Roadmap and a Response to Vize et al.Assessment · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The emotional dot-probe task is a widely used measure of attentional bias to threat. Recent work suggests, however, that subtraction-based behavioral measures of emotional dot-probe performance may not be appropriate for measuring such attentional biases due to poor reliability. In the two current studies, we systematically tested thirty-six versions of the emotional dot-probe that varied in stimuli (faces, scenes, snakes/spiders), timings (stimulus onset asynchrony of 100, 500, 900 milliseconds), stimulus orientations (horizontal, vertical), and trial types (e.g., threat congruent and threat incongruent). Across 9,600 participants, none of the 36 versions demonstrated internal reliability greater than zero. Reliability was similarly poor in anxious participants (based on Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7 Items or Brief Hypervigilance Scale). We conclude that the standard behavioral scores (reaction time- or accuracy-based difference scores) derived from the emotional dot-probe are not adequately reliable measures of attentional biases to threat in anxious or nonanxious populations.
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Registered trials
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.