Citation

Liu AN, Wang LL, Yan TT, Gong J, Liu HY, Jiang Y, Pan ZW, Liu XH. Psychol. Health Med. 2018; 23(9): 1125-1136.

Affiliation

School of Nursing , Second Military Medical University , Shanghai , China.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/13548506.2018.1465575

PMID

29763571

Abstract

Extensive evidence has been obtained that supports an association between an attentional bias (AB) toward negative stimuli and vulnerability to stress-related psychopathology, little is known regarding the characteristics of individual AB in different posttraumatic growth (PTG) levels. The current study used a modified dot-probe task to investigate if individual differences in AB towards either positive or negative emotional stimuli, are related to self-reported PTG. A sample of 202 patients completed the experiment. Patients with low levels of PTG did not exhibit AB toward negative or positive stimuli, patients with medium levels of PTG had difficulty disengaging attention from negative stimuli, patients with high levels of PTG had difficulty disengaging attention from positive stimuli. And the AB towards positive stimuli was only predictive for PTG. An implication of this finding is that there are different characteristics of implicit cognitive processing in patients with different levels of PTG, suggesting the necessity of psychological intervention on the accidentally injured patients.

Language: en

Keywords

Accidental injury; attentional bias; dot-probe task; posttraumatic growth