The Talking Heads Attentional Bias Assessment Task: A Readily Available, Reliable, and Effective Task for Assessing Attentional Bias

Cognitive theories contend that attentional bias to negative information contributes to elevated trait anxiety. However, research in this area has been hindered by the lack of a standardized assessment task that demonstrates the required qualities, including strong internal consistency and ecological validity. The present study aimed to develop and validate the Talking Heads Attentional Bias Assessment Task, an easy-to-implement measure that overcomes the limitations of previous attentional bias assessment tasks. The task employs video-based stimuli conveying emotionally negative or benign information concerning issues that individuals commonly encounter in their daily lives and utilizes a dual-probe methodology to assess attentional bias. A sample of 168 undergraduate students completed the task along with measures of trait and state anxiety. The results demonstrated that the attentional bias index yielded by the task had excellent internal consistency across multiple reliability assessment methods. Greater attentional bias to negative information was also significantly associated with greater trait anxiety, confirming the task’s sensitivity to anxiety-linked individual differences in such attentional bias. Furthermore, mediation analyses revealed that attentional bias mediated the association between trait anxiety and state anxiety elevation in response to emotional information. We discuss the study’s important theoretical and methodological implications, and convey the task’s capacity to enhance assessment of attentional bias across a wide range of psychological domains.