The Effect Of Attentional Bias Training On Resilience, Emotion Experience And Attention Bias In Military Freshmen

As an important indicator for evaluating soldiers’ mental health, resilience has been received an extensive concern of military psychologists around the world. Research suggests that positive cognition, positive emotion and positive coping are the critical aspects of resilience. To be a new cadet or a new recruit is the first step of military career, and there are increasing studies focus on their resilience. How to improve soldiers’ resilience through training thereby enhancing their mental health and preventing psychological problems has already become a research hotspot. However, existing resilience training have some limitation in their longer training time, the need for experimenters throughout, and the restriction of field. Thus exploring an auxiliary or independent method to improve resilience becomes an important task when we promote and develop the resilience training.Attentional bias modification training(ABMT) has significant effect on anxiety related symptoms and other mood disorders in the context of stress. Compared to the traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, ABMT is simple, low cost, short cycle, and low implementation conditions requirements. ABMT has a definite therapeutic effect in the fields of social phobia, childhood obesity, and alcoholic dependence. In recent years, ABMT has gained a rapid development abroad, from one-time training to long-term training, from simple stimuli to personalized stimuli. ABMT is being constantly improved, and has been used in the treatment of anxiety disorders. Recent studies have found that there is a close relationship between resilience and cognitive bias, therefore providing a theoretical basis for ABMT promoting resilience.As military freshmen faced with the high intensive military training and the arduous task of learning, they are more vulnerable to anxiety, depression and other emotional symptoms. So the present study based on the freshmen in military university to investigate the characteristics of cognitive bias in military freshmen explore the relationship among cognitive bias, resilience and emotional experience, and investigate the possibility to improve resilience and emotional experience, increase military environment adaptation ability through ABMT.Methods: A total of 597 military freshmen were surveyed by Attention to Positive And Negative Information Scale( APNIS), Positive and Negative Affect Schedule( PANAS), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory( STAI) and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale( CD-RISC) in the admission and after the military training(a month after admission). 164 military freshmen were further randomly assigned into escape-negative-training group(n=41), neutral-control-training group(n=41), positive-direction training group(n=41) and blank-control group(n=41). Stroop test and scales were measured before and after ABMT.Main findings and conclusions in this study are as follows:1. Significant positive correlations were found between resilience and positive cognitive(P < 0.05). Significant negative correlations were found among resilience with negative affect,negative cognitive,state anxiety and trait anxiety(P < 0.05).4. Correlation analysis showed that the same premise of phase correlation, negative cognitive bias(pre-test) could significantly predict negative affect(post-test) and state anxiety(post-test). Positive cognitive bias(pre-test) could significantly predict negative affect(post-test), state anxiety(post-test) and trait anxiety(post-test). Trait anxiety(pre-test) could significantly predict negative cognitive bias(post-test). Resilience(pre-test) could significantly predict negative cognitive bias(post-test) and positive cognitive bias(post-test). All of these suggest that there is a causal relationship among cognitive bias, resilience and emotional experience in freshmen.5. For the blank-control group, trait anxiety and negative other were significantly increased(P = 0.03, P =0.06), positive affect significantly decreased after training(P = 0.02); Compared with the blank-control group, the change of state anxiety, trait anxiety and positive affect of escape negative group was significant difference after training(P < 0.05). Compared with the blank-control group, the change of scales of neutral-control group was no significant difference after training(P > 0.05); Compared with the blank-control group, the change of trait anxiety of positive direction group was significant difference after training(P < 0.05).These suggest that attention training can reduce the anxiety to a certain extent, but effect on resilience and attention bias need more study.In summary, the results demonstrated a significant relationship among the freshmen’s anxiety, cognitive bias, positive and negative affect, and resilience. Individuals with higher level of anxiety show more negative bias and negative affect, less positive bias and resilience. To a certain extent ABMT can prevent the increase of freshmen’s trait anxiety, while escape-negative attention bias training can reduce the freshmen’s state anxiety and trait anxiety.