Attention Control Treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ׂ(PTSD)

In this intervention, participants will be trained with a personalized Dot-Probe task. Each participant will perform the task with the set of words that he or she ranked as the most threatening according to a Word Ranking Task.

"In this intervention, participants will be trained with the same Dot-Probe task as in the personalized condition, except that the word stimuli will be randomly fit for each participant. It should be noted that 25% out of the words in this condition will be high ranked words according to each patient's word ranking. The aim of this is to enhance similarity to a generic ACT intervention (see Badura-Brack et al., 2015), where there is some degree of exposure to what one may consider personalized stimuli (i.e., threat words that were randomly included by the researchers), although it is not deliberately set to idiosyncratic preferences."

In this intervention, participants will perform a computerized task, similar to the Dot-Probe task. In each trial, one neutral word will be presented at the center of the screen and participants will respond to a probe ('E' or 'f') presented following the removal of the words display. This version does not include the essential ingredients thought to reduce PTSD symptoms in the other dot-probe tasks: exposure to threat content and competition on attentional resources. Thus, this control version provides a control condition for the ACT interventions.