Attentional bias

Attentional bias is the tendency for people's perception to be affected by their recurring thoughts at the time. Attentional biases may explain an individual's failure to consider alternative possibilities, as specific thoughts guide the train of thought in a certain manner. For example, smokers tend to possess a bias for cigarettes and other smoking-related cues around them, due to the positive thoughts they've already attributed between smoking and the cues they were exposed to while smoking. Attentional bias has also been associated with clinically relevant symptoms such as anxiety and depression.

A commonly studied experiment to test for attentional bias is one in which there are two variables, a factor (A) and a result (B). Both can be either present (P) or not present (N). This results in four possible combinations:

The four combinations can be shown in table form as follows:

A common question which follows the structure of the above experiment is: "Does God answer prayers?" Due to attentional bias, theists tend to say "yes". They focus on the present/present (A/B) cell, as their religious beliefs in a deity cause them to fixate on the occasions when they were given what they asked for, thus they use the justification: "Many times I've asked God for something, and he's given it to me." Similarly, due to attentional bias, athiests equally tunnel on data from the present/absent (A/B', A'/B) cells: "Has God ever given me something that I didn't ask for?" or "Have I asked God for something and didn't receive it?" This experiment too supports Smedslund's general conclusion that subjects tend to ignore part of the table depending on their specific attentional biases.

The scenarios can be illustrated below in a similar table to above:

When making decisions, attentional biases toward positive stimuli have been associated with numerous positive outcomes, such as increased social engagement, increased prosocial behaviour, decreased externalizing disorders, and decreased emotionally withdrawn behavior. In contrast, individuals with clinically relevant symptoms, such as anxiety disorder and chronic pain are shown to prioritize threat cues over reward cues. In one experiment, faces with varying valences were presented (neutral, threatening, and happy) with a forced-choice reaction time at two exposure durations, 500 and 1250msec. For individuals with high trait anxiety, there was strong evidence for an attentional bias favoring threatening facial expressions. Additionally, increased dysphoria correlated with the tendency to avoid happy faces. This tendency leads to a spiraling effect, as one will only see negative faces, which induces greater anxiety, which exacerbates the aforementioned tendency to avoid positive stimuli – a form of the vigilance-avoidance pattern.

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