Psychometric Properties of COVID-19 Dot-probe Task in Iranian Adults

After the COVID-19 outbreak, corona anxiety has become prevalent all over the world. To understand and treat this type of anxiety, researchers have examined its relationship with attentional bias, a phenomenon closely associated with other types of anxiety. The dot-probe task is a common instrument used for the evaluation of attentional bias. However, the psychometric properties of this instrument, when used for the assessment of attentional bias towards corona-related stimuli, are unknown. This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the COVID-19 dot-probe task to see whether its application in COVID-19 studies is justified.

A total of 362 Iranian adults completed the COVID-19 dot-probe task and Corona Anxiety Disease Scale (CADS), 146 of whom repeated this procedure after two weeks to provide test-retest data. Split-half reliability, the Cronbach α, intraclass correlation coefficient of test-retest scores, and associations between COVID-19 dot-probe task and CADS were calculated using SPSS v. 26.

The study results indicated that the standard version of the COVID-19 dot-probe task lacks internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and criterion validity, whereas the response-based version of the instrument promotes all of these psychometric properties to an acceptable level.

COVID-19 dot-probe task is a psychometrically sound instrument for evaluating corona-related attentional bias and investigating its role in the mechanism of corona anxiety, only if the response-based method of computation is used for calculating the measures of attentional bias.