Commentary on, 'Internal reliability of measures of substance-related cognitive bias'

A recent paper published in Drug and alcohol dependence (Ataya et al., 2012) is the first systematic attempt to establish the internal reliability of measures of substance-related attentional bias, and it makes an important and long overdue contribution to this topic. The authors reported that the reliability of attentional bias indices derived from the visual probe task was very poor, and while the attentional bias index from the Stroop was a little better, it fell some way short of being acceptable, as α>0.70 in only two of six studies in which the task was used. In this commentary, we speculate on some of the factors that might have contributed to the poor reliability of the tasks, and how task reliability might be improved in future studies.