Does Increasing Attentional Control Decrease Acute Fear Response

Study Summary

Despite decades of research, current psychological treatments designed to treat a variety of mental illnesses are not effective for all who receive them. Specifically, well-supported treatments for mental illnesses that involve fear (e.g., PTSD, panic) appear to be effective for the majority of individuals, but consistently leave a group of "treatment non-responders." One potential explanation for the observed discrepancy in treatment response may be the focus of modern psychotherapies on relieving symptoms specific to categorical diagnoses, rather than mechanisms underlying why the individual is experiencing the symptoms. Recently, fear-based psychological disorders (e.g., PTSD, specific phobia, panic disorder, social anxiety) have been identified as sharing a distinct set of biomarkers, including genetic biomarkers of acute fear (i.e., fear in the moment) and impairments in controlling attention. Neurobehavioral interventions are therefore a promising class of treatments designed to target the biological markers that may be maintaining the symptoms of various psychological disorders. The Attention Training Technique (ATT) is a neurobehavioral intervention that has garnered attention through its demonstrated effectiveness in reducing symptoms across a variety of psychological diagnoses. While grounded in well-established theory, the mechanisms of change in ATT are largely unknown. One proposed mechanism may be that ATT promotes functional connectivity between regions in the brain implicated in top-down executive control over attention (ventromedial prefrontal cortex \[vmPFC\] and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex \[dlPFC\]) and bottom-up attention networks (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex \[dACC\] and amygdala), resulting in increased top-down regulation of potentially problematic bottom-up attentional processes. The same brain regions implicated in both top-down and bottom-up attentional processes have also been associated with fear responding (i.e., startle respons

Primary Outcome

The ANT is a behavioral reaction time (RT) measure of attentional alerting, orienting, and executive control (Fan et al., 2002). The test is a combination of the commonly used flanker task (see Eriksen \& Eriksen, 1974) and a simple cued reaction time task (see Posner, 1980). The ANT provides measures of both RT and error rates (ER). There are several test conditions of interest in the ANT that produce scores that are indications of efficiency in the three separate attention networks.

Conditions Studied

Interventions

• BEHAVIORAL Attention Training Technique
• BEHAVIORAL Sham intervention control condition

Study Locations (1)