Skip to main content
Have a personal or library account? Click to login
Anxiety, Cognitive Biases, and Evaluative Conditioning: An Eye-Tracking Experiment Cover

Anxiety, Cognitive Biases, and Evaluative Conditioning: An Eye-Tracking Experiment

Open Access
|May 2026

References

  1. Armstrong, T., & Olatunji, B. O. (2012). Eye tracking of attention in the affective disorders: A meta-analytic review and synthesis. Clinical Psychology Review, 32, 704723. 10.1016/j.cpr.2012.09.004
  2. Bar-Anan, Y., De Houwer, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2010). Evaluative conditioning and conscious knowledge of contingencies: A correlational investigation with large samples. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(12), 23132335. 10.1080/17470211003802442
  3. Bar-Haim, Y., Lamy, D., Pergamin, L., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: A meta-analytic study. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 124. 10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.1
  4. Besson, T., Richetin, J., & Zerhouni, O. (2023). Effect of emotion dysregulation and emotion regulation strategies on evaluative conditioning. Learning and Motivation, 82. 10.1016/j.lmot.2023.101890
  5. Bornstein, R. F., & Craver-Lemley, C. (2017). Mere exposure effect. In R. F. Pohl (Ed.), Cognitive illusions: Intriguing phenomena in thinking, judgment and memory (2nd ed., pp. 256275). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
  6. Bunghez, C., Rusu, A., De Houwer, J., Perugini, M., Boddez, Y., & Sava, F. A. (2023). The moderating role of neuroticism on evaluative conditioning: Evidence from ambiguous learning situations. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 15(6), 718727. 10.1177/19485506231191861
  7. Carver, C. S., & White, T. L. (1994). Behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation, and affective responses to impending reward and punishment: The BIS/BAS Scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(2), 319333. 10.1037/0022-3514.67.2.319
  8. Casini, E., Richetin, J., Sava, F. A., & Perugini, M. (2023). The moderating role of neuroticism on evaluative conditioning: New insights on the processes underlying this relationship. Collabra: Psychology, 9(1). 10.1525/collabra.74820
  9. Cisler, J. M., & Koster, E. H. (2010). Mechanisms of attentional biases towards threat in anxiety disorders: An integrative review. Clinical Psychological Review, 30(2), 203216. 10.1016/j.cpr.2009.11.003
  10. Corbetta, M., & Shulman, G. L. (2002). Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 201215. 10.1038/nrn755
  11. De Houwer, J. (2018). Propositional models of evaluative conditioning. Social Psychological Bulletin, 13(3), 121. 10.5964/spb.v13i3.28046
  12. De Houwer, J., Thomas, S., & Baeyens, F. (2001). Association learning of likes and dislikes: A review of 25 years of research on human evaluative conditioning. Psychological Bulletin, 127(6), 853. 10.1037//0033-2909.127.6.853
  13. Everaert, J., Duyck, W., & Koster, E. H. W. (2014). Attention, interpretation, and memory biases in subclinical depression: A proof-of-principle test of the combined cognitive biases hypothesis. Emotion, 14(2), 331340. 10.1037/a0035250
  14. Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory. Emotion, 7(2), 336353. 10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.336
  15. Fulcher, E. P., Mathews, A., Mackintosh, B., & Law, S. (2001). Evaluative learning and the allocation of attention to emotional stimuli. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 25(3), 261280. 10.1023/A:1010732328104
  16. Gámez, W., Chmielewski, M., Kotov, R., Ruggero, C., Suzuki, N., & Watson, D. (2014). The brief experiential avoidance questionnaire: Development and initial validation. Psychological Assessment, 26(1), 3545. 10.1037/a0034473
  17. Gast, A. (2018). A declarative memory model of evaluative conditioning. Social Psychological Bulletin, 13(3). 10.5964/spb.v13i3.28590
  18. Gast, A., Richter, J., & Benedict, T. (2025). Memory Retrieval in Acquired Attitudes. Preprint at PsyArXiv. 10.31234/osf.io/9v7rj_v1
  19. Glaser, T., & Walther, E. (2012). One but not the same: Evaluative conditioning with mixed-valence USs. Learning and Motivation, 43(4), 144154. 10.1016/j.lmot.2012.06.005
  20. Glaser, T., Woud, M. W., Iskander, M. L., Schmalenstroth, V., & My Vo, T. (2018). Positive, negative, or all relative? Evaluative conditioning of ambivalence. Acta Psychologica, 185, 155165. 10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.02.006
  21. Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271299. 10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271
  22. Hayes, A. F. (2022). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach (3rd ed.). The Guilford Press.
  23. Herrera, S., Montorio, I., Cabrera, I., & Botella, J. (2017). Memory bias for threatening information related to anxiety: an updated meta-analytic review. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 29(7), 832854. 10.1080/20445911.2017.1319374
  24. Hofmann, W., De Houwer, J., Perugini, M., Baeyens, F., & Crombez, G. (2010). Evaluative conditioning in humans: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 390. 10.1037/a0018916
  25. Ingendahl, M., & Vogel, T. (2023). (Why) Do Big Five personality traits moderate evaluative conditioning? The role of US extremity and pairing memory. Collabra: Psychology, 9(1). 10.1525/collabra.74812
  26. Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 7889. 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003
  27. Kattner, F. (2012). Revisiting the relation between contingency awareness and attention: Evaluative conditioning relies on a contingency focus. Cognition and Emotion, 26(1), 166175. 10.1080/02699931.2011.565036
  28. Koster, E. H., Crombez, G., Verschuere, B., Van Damme, S., & Wiersema, J. R. (2006). Components of attentional bias to threat in high trait anxiety: Facilitated engagement, impaired disengagement, and attentional avoidance. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(12), 17571771. 10.1016/j.brat.2005.12.011
  29. Lang, P. J., Bradley, M. M., & Cuthbert, B. N. (2005). International affective picture system (IAPS): Digitised photographs, instruction manual and affective ratings. Technical report A-6. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida. 10.1037/t66667-000
  30. Lazar, A., Rougier, M., Perugini, M., & Sava, F. A. (2025). Moderating effect of stimulus presentation type, contingency awareness and anxiety on evaluative conditioning: An attentional perspective. Cognition and Emotion, 111. 10.1080/02699931.2025.2528924
  31. Leung, C. J., Yiend, J., Trotta, A., & Lee, T. M. C. (2022). The combined cognitive bias hypothesis in anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 89, 102575. 10.1016/j.janxdis.2022.102575
  32. Lommen, M. J., Engelhard, I. M., & van den Hout, M. A. (2010). Neuroticism and avoidance of ambiguous stimuli: Better safe than sorry? Personality and Individual Differences, 49(8), 10011006. 10.1016/j.paid.2010.08.012
  33. Marchetti, I., Everaert, J., Dainer-Best, J., Loeys, T., Beevers, C. G., & Koster, E. H. W. (2018). Specificity and overlap of attention and memory biases in depression. Journal of Affective Disorders, 1(225), 404412. 10.1016/j.jad.2017.08.037
  34. McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1992). Discriminant validity of NEO-PIR facet scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 52(1), 229237. 10.1177/001316449205200128
  35. Mitte, K. (2008). Memory bias for threatening information in anxiety and anxiety disorders: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 134(6), 886911. 10.1037/a0013343
  36. Moran, T. Y., Bar-Anan, Y., & Nudler, Y. (2023). Evaluative Conditioning: Past, Present, and Future. Annual Review of Psychology, 74, 245269. 10.31219/osf.io/uesjr
  37. Shechner, T., Britton, J. C., Pérez-Edgar, K., Bar-Haim, Y., Ernst, M., Fox, N. A., Leibenluft, E., & Pine, D. S. (2012). Attention biases, anxiety, and development: toward or away from threats or rewards? Depression & Anxiety, 29(4), 282294. 10.1002/da.20914
  38. Tottenham, N., Tanaka, J. W., Leon, A. C., McCarry, T., Nurse, M., Hare, T. A., Marcus, D. J., Westerlund, A., Casey, B. J., & Nelson, C. (2009). The NimStim set of facial expressions: Judgments from untrained research participants. Psychiatry Research, 168(3), 242249. 10.1016/j.psychres.2008.05.006
  39. Veerapa, E., Grandgenèvre, P., El Fayoumi, M., Vinnac, B., Haelewyn, O., Szaffarczyk, S., Vaiva, G., & D’Hondt, F. (2020). Attentional bias towards negative stimuli in healthy individuals and the effects of trait anxiety. Scientific Reports, 10, 11826. 10.1038/s41598-020-68490-5
  40. Vogel, T., Hütter, M., & Gebauer, J. E. (2019). Is evaluative conditioning moderated by Big Five personality traits? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(1), 94102. 10.1177/1948550617740193
  41. Weber, F., Alves, H., Vogel, T., & Ingendahl, M. (2025). Evaluative conditioning with multiple unconditioned stimuli – Integration at judgment? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 121. 10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104820
  42. Williams, J. M. G., Watts, F. N., MacLeod, C., & Mathews, A. (1988). Cognitive psychology and emotional disorders. John Wiley & Sons.
  43. Ziegler, M., Horstmann, K. T., & Ziegler, J. (2019). Personality in situations: Going beyond the OCEAN and introducing the Situation Five. Psychological Assessment, 31(4), 567580. 10.1037/pas0000654
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.1205 | Journal eISSN: 2397-8570
Language: English
Page range: 7 - 7
Submitted on: Nov 23, 2025
Accepted on: Mar 10, 2026
Published on: May 11, 2026
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2026 Anca Lazar, Marine Rougier, Jan De Houwer, Marco Perugini, Andrei Rusu, Florin Alin Sava, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.