The aim here is to study the cognitive biases (attentional and memory) in different disorders such as specific phobias, panic disorder and agoraphobia, social phobia, depression and eating disorders.

We have probably used the most common task in this area to assess the cognitive bias: the emotional Stroop task. In this task the researcher can observe the attentional bias due to the participant’s impaired performance. We have made a computerized version of the emotional Stroop task to prove whether attentional bias has been produced before the person´s conscious perception. In this computerized version of the Stroop task the words were presented in subliminal format. On the other hand, we have also studied the change of these attentional biases (to see whether they decrease or disappear) after an applied CBT for social phobia and panic disorder. In general, the results indicate that it is necessary the use of a task with a higher ecological validity. Furthermore, it is necessary to introduce therapeutic principles to facilitate the change of these biases.

Recently, we have used Virtual Reality (VR) to evaluate the attentional biases in subjects with fear of spiders and individuals with fear of public speaking. Virtual Reality (VR) provides higher ecological validity because the virtual environments are “real” situations. In this virtual environment, the individuals can see the feared object such as spiders or their audience. Moreover, we want to see whether these biases happen outside of the aware perception of the feared object. Also, we are interested to see if these biases are different depending on the anxiety disorder. Finally, we want to analyze whether there is a decrease of the biases after CBT with “virtual exposure”, or even if these biases disappear.