Rumination Moderates the Effects of Cognitive Bias Modification of Attention

For information on specific stimuli used in the attention training task and/or in the assessment of attention biases, please contact the first author, Kimberly A. Arditte, at karditte@psy.miami.edu.

Though a systematic examination of the moderating effects of depression and social anxiety symptoms were beyond the scope of this paper, analyses were conducted to ensure that the reported moderation effects were not driven by either of these related constructs. To do this, zero-order correlations were used to examine the relation between self-reported depression (Beck Depression Inventory, Second Edition; Beck et al. 1996) and social anxiety (Social Interaction Anxiety Scale; Mattick and Clarke 1998) symptoms and all outcome variables. Depression was significantly associated with post-training FC for positive stimuli (r = .24, p = .046), but no other pre- or post-training eye tracking indices (all p’s > .10). Social anxiety was not related to any of the eye tracking variables at pre- or post-training (all p’s > .10). In addition, depression was significantly associated with negative affect at baseline (r = .31, p = .002), whereas social anxiety was related to negative affect following the stressor (r = .55, p < .001). No other relations between depression or social anxiety and affect at baseline or stressor were found (all p’s > .10). Where significant relations were found, depression and/or social anxiety were controlled for in moderation analyses. This did not impact any of our original results. Rumination still did not moderate the NAB condition’s effect on subsequent negative affect (β = .03, t [84] = .19, p = .85 and β = .05, t [44] = .27, p = .78 when controlling for depression and social anxiety, respectively), nor did it impact the PAB condition’s effect on FC for positive stimuli at post-training (β = .11, t [56] = .54, p = .59).