Background. Attention bias modification (ABM) is a new treatment for affective disorders. A meta-analysis of ABM for anxiety disorders showed that the effect size may be large but the number of studies is low. The working mechanism is still unclear, and little is known about the optimal treatment parameters. ABM for depression is much less studied. A few studies claimed positive effects but the sample sizes are low. Furthermore, the treatment parameters varied widely and differed from the anxiety literature. Aim. To select the most promising version of ABM for depression for further evaluation in clinical trials. Methods. Multiple case series design. We tested six versions of ABM that varied on stimulus duration and training direction. Thirty students with mild to moderate symptoms of depression underwent four sessions of ABM. Change of attentional bias was measured during each session. Generalization of treatment effects and the role of awareness of receiving training were also investigated. Results. None of the investigated versions of ABM had a consistent effect on attentional bias. Changes of attentional bias in individual participants the effects did not generalize to untrained stimuli. Conclusion. It is unlikely that any of these ABM versions will have a specific effect on symptoms in controlled studies. 1. Introduction A growing body of literature reports that computerized attention training programs are successful in reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression. These attentional bias modification (ABM) procedures intend to reduce or even reverse patients’ habitual tendency to direct their attention towards negative information. Most of these studies use variants of the dot probe task [1]. In ABM variants of this task, participants are implicitly taught to direct their attention away from negative information (a picture or word). This is accomplished by administering several hundreds of trials that involve brief simultaneous presentations of negative and neutral information, followed by a target. This target is systematically presented at the location of the neutral information [2]. In a recent meta-analysis, an effect size of was reported for ABM for anxiety over a placebo training [3]. The authors concluded that these training programs show promise as a new treatment but also qualify the research on ABM as immature. Nine of the twelve studies were conducted in nonclinical samples (anxious students or adults), while only three studies concerned patients with an anxiety disorder. The effect sizes across trials also varied substantially, and an
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