In the week after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded about a hundred bias threats each day, but by early December that number had dropped to about half a dozen.
If conducted properly, they minimise the risk of bias (threats to internal validity), particularly selection bias. 1 2 There is, however, considerable evidence that trials are not always well reported, 3 4 and this can be associated with bias, such as selective reporting of outcomes.
In the same line, Mackintosh and Mathews (2003) postulate that when the importance and emotional significance of threatening stimuli increase, anxiety patients show a reflexive attentional bias toward threat instead of avoidance of threat.
Thus, faster latencies to detect a probe following threat-relevant pictures relative to neutral pictures would indicate an attentional bias toward threat.
No differences were found on other pain outcomes regarding bias or threat, and the efficacy of the bias modification was not impacted by different levels of threat.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that s-allele carriers usually demonstrate increased attentional bias for threat (19 26), which has been confirmed in a recent meta-analysis, and increased amygdala reactivity to threat-related images (27,28).
Attentional bias for threat: Crisis or opportunity?
Furthermore, the active tDCS group showed reduced attentional bias to threat, compared to the sham group.
These findings support attentional bias towards threat as a relatively independent factor predictive of emotional responding.
Attentional bias towards threat reliably correlates with clinical anxiety status as well as elevated trait anxiety.
