There is substantial evidence that heightened anxiety vulnerability is characterized by increased selective attention to threatening information. The reliability of this anxiety-linked attentional bias has become the focus of considerable recent interest. We distinguish between the potential inconsistency of anxiety-linked attentional bias and inconsistency potentially reflecting the psychometric properties of the assessment approaches used to measure it. Though groups with heightened anxiety vulnerability often exhibit, on average, elevated attention to threat, the evidence suggests that individuals are unlikely to each display a stable, invariant attentional bias to threat. Moreover, although existing assessment approaches can differentiate between groups, they do not exhibit the internal consistency or test-retest reliability necessary to classify individuals in terms of their characteristic pattern of attentional responding to threat. We discuss the appropriate uses of existing attentional bias assessment tasks and propose strategies for enhancing classification of individuals in terms of their tendency to display an attentional bias to threat.

中文翻译：

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焦虑相关的注意偏见：可靠吗？

有大量证据表明，焦虑脆弱性增强的特征是对威胁性信息的选择性关注增加。这种与焦虑相关的注意力偏倚的可靠性已成为近期引起广泛关注的焦点。我们区分了焦虑相关的注意偏见的潜在不一致和潜在反映用于评估它的评估方法的心理计量学特性的不一致。尽管焦虑脆弱性较高的人群通常平均表现出对威胁的关注度提高，但证据表明，个体不太可能对威胁表现出稳定的，不变的注意偏见。而且，尽管现有的评估方法可以区分不同的群体，它们没有表现出根据注意力对威胁做出反应的特征模式对个人进行分类所必需的内部一致性或重测可靠性。我们讨论了现有注意偏见评估任务的适当用法，并提出了根据个人对威胁表现出注意偏见的趋势来增强个人分类的策略。