Ben is a Senior Lecturer in the University of Western Australia’s School of Psychological Science, and co-director of the School’s Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion (www.ermcare.com). The major objectives of his research are to: i. delineate the patterns of biased information processing that underpin individual differences in emotional vulnerability; and ii. determine the causal nature of observed associations between each such information processing bias and emotional vulnerability. His work is currently funded by a Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA), the aim of which is to determine the contribution of bias in selective attention, and in selective memory, to anxiety-linked heightened negative expectancies.

Cognitive models contend that attentional bias to negative information contributes to elevated anxiety vulnerability. Conventional approaches for assessing such bias demonstrate low psychometric reliability, leading to calls for the development of new tasks with the capacity to more reliably assess variation in selective attention. Ben will report development of the dual probe attentional assessment task, which demonstrates much higher psychometric reliability than conventional approaches, and can sensitively detect anxietylinked attentional bias to negative information. An additional strength of this new methodology is that it permits assessment of selective attention during presentation of video clip stimuli. Drawing upon his DECRA-funded research investigating the contribution of attention bias to anxiety-linked heightened negative expectancies, Ben will illustrate how using such stimuli has the potential to powerfully advance attentional bias research, by enabling more precise hypotheses concerning the attentional basis of elevated anxiety vulnerability, and other dimensions of individual difference, to be rigorously tested.