Attentional Bias Toward Threat in Sexually Victimized Hispanic Women: A Dot Probe Study

ABSTRACT

The current study examined attentional bias toward threat in Hispanic college women exposed to lifetime sexual victimization in childhood, adulthood, and both childhood and adulthood. Response latencies and attention bias scores were compared between victimized and non-victimized individuals. Participants were 20 women exposed to adulthood sexual victimization (AS group), 15 exposed to childhood sexual victimization (CS group), 8 exposed to both childhood and adulthood sexual assault (revictimization: RV group), and 20 not endorsing sexual victimization (NS group). They were asked to complete the dot-probe task. The CS group and RV group were combined to create the CS-RV group. Among the AS and CS-RV groups, response latencies were faster when attention was engaged to threat than when attention was engaged to non-threat. The NS group did not demonstrate such differences. When response latencies were compared among the three groups, the CS-RV group had slower response latencies than the NS group. The CS-RV and AS groups revealed similarly significantly elevated bias scores toward threat words than the NS group. Hispanic college women exposed to lifetime sexual victimization display elevated levels of attention bias compared to non-victimized women. Further, the current findings align with an integrative cognitive model for explaining maladaptive informational processing in trauma victims.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive processes
• sexual assault
• attentional bias
• Hispanic women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ There were errors in the symptom measure and thus the current study did not include the measure for the analysis.

² The concept of the false discovery rate (FDR) was developed by Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). The FDR is considered more powerful than the Bonferroni correction and is less prone to committing Type I errors than making no corrections (Maxwell & Delaney, 2004)

³ Compared to Bardeen et al.’s dot-probe study in PTSD (Bardeen et al., 2016), this proportion was high. This was due likely to the fact that the current study applied a stricter outlier cut off (2 SD) compared to Bardeens’ study using 3 SD, as one of the outlier criteria.

⁴ The original formula is below:

A bias score = ((upper probe following upper threat – upper probe following lower threat) + (lower probe following lower threat – lower probe following upper threat))/2.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.