Music Hath Charms to Soothe the Anxious Breast

Attentional bias modification therapies are being investigated for several clinical problems; examples include focusing attention to cognitively salient issues in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and reducing attention to anxiety-activating stimuli in post-traumatic stress disorder. To see whether redirecting attention away from threatening stimuli might improve symptoms in social anxiety disorder, investigators randomized 40 treatment-seeking patients with clinically significant social anxiety disorder (20 men; mean age, 34; mean years of education, 14) to gaze-contingent music reward therapy or to a control condition.

All patients chose tracks of personally enjoyable pleasant music to be played during the experiment, which entailed…