Attentional Bias to Threat in Resettled Refugees with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Perspective

Resettled refugees with varying degrees of war trauma exposure participated in three free-viewing paradigms assessing attentional bias expressions in post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite the differences in clinical profiles across the three groups, an attentional bias to trauma-relevant images (i.e., war) was apparent transdiagnostically. However, the bias generalised beyond the original trauma for people with post-traumatic stress disorder and included all negative information (i.e., trauma-relevant, general threat, and dysphoric). Therapeutic techniques that manipulate and redirect attentional biases, to more healthy orientations, should be investigated as a possible intervention for underserviced populations such as forcibly displaced persons worldwide.