Fig. 1.

An illustration of the dot-probe task. In the dot-probe task, participants see a pair of stimuli simultaneously, one emotionally salient (e.g., threatening) and one neutral (e.g., non-threatening), most often for 500 ms. A probe replaces one of the two stimuli. The individual is required to respond as accurately and as quickly as possible to the probe. An attentional bias towards emotional stimuli is inferred when participants preferentially attend to emotional cues, resulting in decreased reaction times to probes replacing the emotional stimuli compared to the neutral stimuli. A direct extension of the dot-probe task has been attention bias modification (ABM), which is used to reduce affect-biased attention. The training procedure only uses incongruent trials. The logic is that by having the probe replace the emotional or neutral stimuli in all the trials, the individual implicitly learns to attend towards the neutral stimuli/away from the emotional stimuli.