Impact of emotional working memory training on threat-related attentional bias in social anxiety: Evidence from eye movements.

Threat-related attentional bias is a core characteristic of social anxiety and is closely associated with impaired attentional control. While traditional working memory training (WM-T) improves cognitive control and emotional regulation, it does not address emotional information processing. Emotional working memory training (EWM-T), which integrates negative emotional stimuli, may enhance control over negative information. This study hypothesizes that EWM-T can reduce threat-related attentional bias in socially anxious individuals and outperform WM-T in decreasing sustained attention to negative stimuli. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of EWM-T. Experiment 1 employed a dot-probe task and eye-tracking to examine threat-related attentional bias in high and low social anxiety groups. Experiment 2 compared EWM-T with WM-T in a randomized controlled trial, in which participants with high social anxiety completed 20 training sessions over 30 days. Transfer effects were evaluated pre- and post-training using the Stroop task, number-switching task, digit-span task, and active memory task. In Experiment 1, individuals with high social anxiety exhibited greater attentional vigilance and faster detection of threat stimuli. In Experiment 2, both groups showed reductions in anxiety symptoms and practice-related improvements on several cognitive tasks, with no Group × Time interactions. Post-training eye-tracking data revealed a decrease in fixation bias toward threat stimuli, indicating improved attentional control. These findings suggest that EWM-T enhances attentional orientation and alleviates anxiety symptoms in social anxiety, with stronger transfer effects compared to WM-T. Incorporating emotional content into working memory training offers advantages for clinical interventions in social anxiety.