Does Increasing Attentional Control Decrease Acute Fear Response

ATT will be administered through a customized Expiwell smartphone application that will be downloaded onto participants' cell phones at the first laboratory session (T2). For the purposes of the proposed study, participants need to complete the intervention once a day, for the six days between their lab sessions; signals will begin the day after their T2 session and they will be notified up to a maximum of five times per day to complete their daily session. The ATT sessions are comprised of three phases. The first is a 5-minute phase during which the participant is instructed to attend to specific sounds in the recording and disregard other sounds. The subsequent 5-minute phase includes instructions to rapidly switch their attention between sounds in the recording. The final phase is a dual attention task lasting 2 minutes wherein the participant is instructed to pay attention to multiple sounds in the recording at once. In total, each session of ATT lasts 12 minutes.

The sham control condition consists of the same 12 minutes of simultaneous sounds as the ATT technique, but will not include any verbal instruction, thus isolating the effects of intentional orientation of attention.