The Effect of Audio Visual Entrainment on Pre-Attentive Dysfunctional Processing to Stressful Events in Anxious Individuals

Abstract

Experimental single case studies on automatic processing of emotion were carried on a sample of people with an anxiety disorder. Participants were required to take three Audio Visual Entrainment (AVE) sessions to test for anxiety reduction as proclaimed by some academic research. Explicit reports were measured as well as pre-attentive bias to stressing information by using affective priming studies before and after AVE intervention. Group analysis shows that indeed AVEs program applications do reduce anxiety producing significant changes over explicit reports on anxiety levels and automatic processing bias of emotion. However, case by case analysis of six anxious participants shows that even when all of the participants report emotional improvement after intervention, not all of them reduce or eliminate dysfunctional bias to stressing information. Rather, they show a variety of processing styles due to intervention and some of them show no change at all. Implications of this differential effect to clinical sets are discussed.