Attention-control Video Game Curbs Combat Vets' PTSD Symptoms
From: Medical Design Technology - 07/24/2015

A computerized attention-control training program significantly reduced
combat veterans' preoccupation with - or avoidance of - threat and attendant
PTSD symptoms.

Attention-control training implicitly teaches participants that threatening
stimuli are irrelevant to performing their task. It requires them to attend
equally to threatening and neutral stimuli. The study determined that this
reduced symptoms by reducing attention bias variability. Attention control
training balances such moment-to-moment fluctuations in attention bias from
threat vigilance to threat avoidance, which correlated with the severity of
PTSD symptoms and distinguished PTSD patients from healthy controls and
patients with social anxiety or acute stress disorders.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.mdtmag.com/news/2015/07/attention-control-video-game-curbs-combat-vets-ptsd-symptoms

Links:
Effect of Attention Training on Attention Bias Variability and PTSD Symptoms:
  Randomized Controlled Trials in Israeli and US Combat Veterans 
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.14121578

Daniel Pine
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/labs-at-nimh/principal-investigators/daniel-pine.shtml

Yair Bar-Haim
http://socsci.tau.ac.il/psy-eng/index.php/staff/faculty/174-yair-bar-haim3

Laboratory for Research on Anxiety and Trauma
http://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/anxietytrauma/