A psychometric comparison of anxiety-relevant attention measures.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Preferential attention to threat, emotional response inhibition, and attentional control each purportedly play a key role in anxiety disorders. Divergent psychometric properties among attention measures may produce differential detection of anxiety-related associations and treatment-related changes. However, no studies have directly compared the psychometric properties of these attention measures in the same sample.

DESIGN: Eighty-five young adults (M = 19.41 years, SD = 1.47, 48 Females) completed a cognitive task battery and a subset of 60 participants (M = 19.42 years, SD = 1.48, 33 Females) completed the task battery again approximately two weeks later.

METHOD: To assess preferential attention to threat, emotional response inhibition, and attentional control, the cognitive task battery included a dot-probe task, emotion and gender Stroop tasks, and a flanker task. Tasks varied in how attention was directed and if emotional stimuli were included. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were compared across measures.

RESULTS: Within the same sample, internal consistency and reliability differed across attention measures. Explicit attention measures (emotional Stroop and flanker) exhibited stronger internal consistency and greater test-retest reliability compared to implicit measures (dot-probe and gender Stroop).

CONCLUSIONS: These results inform clinical research using attention measures to assess anxiety-related differences and treatment response.