The relationship between cognitive avoidance and attentional bias for snake-related thoughts

Building on the work of Lavy and van den Hout (Lavy, E. H., & van den Hout, M. A. (1994a). Cognitive avoidance and attentional bias: Causal relationships. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 18 (2) 179-191; Lavy, E. H., & van den Hout, M. A. (1994b). Cognitive avoidance and attentional bias: Causal relationships. Behavior Therapy, 24, 645-657), the purpose of the present study was to examine a functional relationship between thought suppression and attentional bias for snake-related thoughts. It was hypothesized that thought suppression is causally involved in the emergence of attentional bias. An experiment was conducted with 71 snake-fearful and non-snake-fearful participants to investigate whether instructions for suppression were sufficient to induce an attentional bias toward snake-related words. Thirty-five participants were instructed to suppress all snake-related thoughts, while 36 participants received control instructions. Both groups then completed a 5-min stream of consciousness exercise followed by a dot-probe attention task including snake words, general emotion words, and neutral words. Results indicated that participants instructed to suppress snake-related thoughts exhibited a more pronounced attentional bias toward snake-related word pairs. The same participants did not exhibit an attentional bias toward general emotion or neutral words. Moreover, there was a significant negative correlation between snake-related thoughts and probe detection latency. Results are interpreted as providing support for a causal relationship between thought suppression and attentional bias for snake-related thoughts.