رابطه بین اجتناب شناختی و تعصب توجه برای افکار مربوط به مار

Thirty-five participants were instructed to suppress all snake-related thoughts, while 36 participants received control instructions. Both groups then completed a 5-min stream of consciousness exercise followed by a dot-probe attention task including snake words, general emotion words, and neutral words. Results indicated that participants instructed to suppress snake-related thoughts exhibited a more pronounced attentional bias toward snake-related word pairs. The same participants did not exhibit an attentional bias toward general emotion or neutral words. Moreover, there was a significant negative correlation between snake-related thoughts and probe detection latency. Results are interpreted as providing support for a causal relationship between thought suppression and attentional bias for snake-related thoughts.