The effect of cognitive bias modification training on memory of emotional words in anxious children

Abstract

Previous research had demonstrated cognitive biases towards threatening stimuli in anxious individuals, such as in attention, interpretation and memory. The present study aimed to examine the differences in memory-related information processing between anxious and nonanxious children and the effectiveness of a Cognitive-Bias Modification (CBM) based positive training in altering these differences. The study adopted a directed forgetting paradigm, where children with anxiety disorders (N=12) and healthy controls (N=12) were asked to either forget or remember word lists comprised of words of negative or positive valence, and were later asked to recall and recognize target words. The CBM training was subsequently administered, in which subjects were trained to endorse positive interpretations to ambiguous situations, followed by a similar directed forgetting task for post-training assessment. Results revealed that the CBM training was effective in reducing the hypervigilance towards negative words in anxious children, as well as reducing recall of negative words in all subjects. Clinical implications and limitations of the study were discussed.