Unhelpful Habits 175
improving anxiety. We showed in chapter 6 that mindful-
ness meditation is one potential way of correcting cognitive
biases; however, other techniques have been developed from
an implicit emotion regulation framework. Remember,
implicit emotion regulation refers to those ways by which we
manage our emotions unconsciously. One such technique is
attention bias modification, which refers to a host of atten-
tion exercises designed to train your attention away from
negative threats and toward positive stimuli.
A typical attention bias modification treatment session
involves observing faces presented on a screen. Some of
these faces have judgmental expressions, some have neutral
expressions, and others have positive expressions. Then the
faces are replaced by symbols, and you must locate a certain
symbol. Using the logic of the cognitive bias studies men-
tioned above, this treatment assumes that if you have an
anxiety disorder, you will direct your attention to the face
with the most negative expression first. Therefore, the target
symbol is programmed to more often appear in the location
of a face with a positive expression. Over time, you become
better at paying attention to faces with positive expressions.
In this way, repeated practice with attention bias modifica-
tion tasks often reduces attention biases toward threat.
Heeren et al. (2012) recruited participants with social
anxiety disorder to enter one of three attention training con-
ditions before giving a two- minute impromptu speech about
a negative emotional experience, which would be video
recorded. These three training conditions taught the par-
ticipants to use their attention in very different ways. In the
attend to positive (AP) condition, participants were trained
to direct their attention to warm, welcoming faces 80 percent