In these studies, both published in the February Journal of Abnormal Psychology, attention training alleviated anxiety disorders just as effectively as cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy and antianxiety medication had in earlier investigations. Yet attention training requires minimal professional supervision, causes no side effects and could be completed over the Internet.
“I’m somewhat amazed that one to two hours of attention training could have such a dramatic impact on anxiety disorders,” Schmidt says. Several research groups, including Schmidt’s and Amir’s, plan to evaluate whether symptom improvement following attention training lasts beyond four months, the follow-up period for the two studies. Researchers also plan to combine attention training with psychotherapy for anxiety disorders.
In an on-going effort to see what else is out there to help with the anxiety, I’ve stumbled on this article from Science News about attention training.
Amir’s team randomly assigned 14 patients with generalized anxiety disorder to receive attention-training sessions two times a week for eight weeks. Each session lasted 15 to 20 minutes.
In a series of trials, each participant briefly saw a pair of words on a computer screen — one emotionally neutral and one emotionally threatening. As quickly as possible, volunteers had to identify a letter, either E or F, that had replaced one of the words. On most occasions, the E or F replaced a neutral word. In this way, participants unknowingly practiced diverting their attention away from threatening words.
Another 15 patients completed placebo sessions in which letters replaced neutral words half the time and threatening words half the time. Thus, these volunteers received no training to look away from either threatening or neutral words.
Four months after attention training, seven of 14 patients had recovered from generalized anxiety disorder, compared with only two of 15 patients in the other group.
I realize that not all things will help everyone but it definately pays to look at all the options. Hope you find the article as interesting as I did.
