The talking heads attentional bias assessment task: A readily available, reliable, and effective task for assessing attentional bias
Mahdi Mazidi, Colin MacLeod, Seyran Ranjbar, Owen Myles, Ben Grafton · 2026
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Description
Mahdi Mazidi and colleagues introduce a 2026 task for measuring attention bias toward bad news. Theories link such bias to anxiety, yet older tasks lack steady scores and real-life feel. Their Talking Heads task uses short videos of people voicing daily concerns, with probes to track where attention lands.
A group of 168 students took the task plus anxiety measures. The bias score proved highly steady across split checks, a rare strength in this field. Students with stronger bias toward negative content scored higher on lasting anxiety. Bias also carried the link between lasting anxiety and state anxiety spikes when facing emotional content. The task is free to use and may serve many study areas.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Mahdi Mazidi, Colin MacLeod, Seyran Ranjbar, Owen Myles, Ben Grafton |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 50 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |