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

Objective: After the COVID19 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 dotprobe 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 coronarelated stimuli, are unknown. This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the COVID19 dotprobe task to see whether its application in COVID19 studies is justified. Methods: A total of 362 Iranian adults completed the COVID19 dotprobe task and Corona Anxiety Disease Scale (CADS), 146 of whom repeated this procedure after two weeks to provide testretest data. Splithalf reliability, the Cronbach alpha, intraclass correlation coefficient of test-retest scores, and associations between COVID19 dotprobe task and CADS were calculated using SPSS v. 26. Results: The study results indicated that the standard version of the COVID19 dotprobe 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. Conclusion: COVID19 dotprobe 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 responsebased method of computation is used for calculating the measures of attentional bias.