Selective attention evidenced by pictorial and linguistic stroop tasks

Attentional biases to threatening stimuli are frequently demonstrated in anxious subjects by means of various linguistic experimental tasks. We argue that, for reasons of both ecological validity and accessibility of affective information, a pictorial task would be a more appropriate test of attentional bias in subjects with spider phobia. Before and after a two-session exposure treatment, 25 subjects with spider phobia were presented with a combined pictoria/linguistic Stroop task. As hypothesized, subjects with spider phobia showed an attentional bias for pictorial and linguistic spider-related stimuli and both attentional biases were strongly reduced after treatment. In contrast to our expectations, pictorial stimuli generally resulted in smaller attentional biases than linguistic stimuli. A post hoc explanation is discussed.