Attentional bias is when a person focuses on a specific stimulus, leading to poor judgment and incomplete recall. It can result from a psychological disorder or be innate. The Stroop task measures attention bias, and it has been studied in relation to phobias, substance abuse, and alcoholism.
Attentional bias is an event in which a person focuses his attention more towards a specific stimulus or sensory cue. Often, this leads to a poor sense of judgment or incomplete recall of a particular event or memory. Attentional biases can also lead to poor decision making, as the person already has a bias towards a stimulus and is more likely to base their decision on that preference.
Some psychologists believe that humans already have a tendency to bias attention in some situations due to the “evolution of human intelligence” and the need to survive. For this reason, people usually pay more attention to stimuli that pose a threat to them, such as a gun when a person is mugged on the street. This “hyperattention” is usually associated with sensory responses such as tunnel vision, in which the frightened person temporarily loses his peripheral vision and focuses on the threatening object. It also usually triggers some physiological response such as an adrenaline rush and an increase in heart rate, even a neurological reaction that allows the person to have a faster reflex when the situation worsens.
A moderate level of attention bias may be innate in humans, but a high level may be a symptom or result of a psychological disorder. One approach to measuring this bias is the Stroop task. In this test, words related to color are written in different colors; for example the word “blue” is written in yellow. The patient is then asked to say the color of the word aloud, not the word itself; in the example above, the correct answer would be “yellow” and not “blue”. A person with a high level of attention bias may take longer to respond correctly. In some case studies, participants who had severe anxieties and phobias were shown to have difficulty pronouncing the color of certain suggestive words such as “spider” or “blood,” as their inclination to focus on the word itself means of accomplishing the main task.
Attention bias has been studied not only in relation to phobias and psychological disorders, but also in the context of alcoholism and substance abuse. In separate experiments, the participants, made up of drug addicts and drinkers, showed more responses to words or objects that involved drugs or alcohol, or had greater cravings for the substances. These findings may provide an explanation of why it is beneficial for recovering addicts to avoid any situation involving drugs or alcohol.
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