Novel Treatments of Phobias in Children and Teenagers

Active attention bias modification training and exposure therapy versus a control attention bias modification condition and exposure therapy. Participants recieve one individual session (3 hours) of exposure therapy. The session involves assisting participants to sytematically and gradually face their fears. Half the participants will complete 1 session of attention bias modification training immediately prior to the exposure therapy session that involves training attention towards positive stimuli (happy faces) and thus away from threat stimuli (angry faces) while the control condition will have their attention trained equally to positive and threat stimuli. The attention bias modification training is delivered via a computer. Children will see happy-angry adult face pairs for 500 ms after which time the face pairs are replaced with an asterisk probe behind one of the faces. In attention training to positive stimuli, the probe always follows the happy face, in the control attention training condition, the probe follows the angry face and happy face equally. Children press one of two keys on the keyboard which side – left or right – the probe appeared on the screen. They will complete 160 trials, lasting approximately 15 min. The exposure therapy is delivered next by trained psychologists.