The Red and Black

Issue date: 4/22/08 Section: News

Media Credit: JAKE CLARK Professor Nader Amir of San Diego University delivers a lecture entitled "Modification of Attention Bias in Anxious Individuals: A Novel Treatment for Anxiety" at the Student Learning Center on Monday. [Click to enlarge]

The U.S. military is considering a computer program designed by a former University professor to treat Iraq War veterans who have cases of anxiety, a lecturer said Monday.

"Hundreds of thousands of soldiers are returning to the U.S. with anxiety and depression problems," Nader Amir, now an associate professor of psychology at San Diego University, said. "This treatment has very little costs and very easy dissemination."

The Associated Press reported on Monday that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is struggling to provide adequate care for war veterans, and according to a study by the RAND Corp. released Sunday, about 20 percent of U.S. troops deployed are suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress.

Amir's program requires patients to participate in a computerized exercise for 10 minutes twice a week for four weeks, and it yields a 50 to 70 percent remission rate. This means that after four weeks, more than half the participants no longer exhibit symptoms of anxiety.

Amir said his training appears successful even after one year of treatment, based on his follow-up evaluations.

He said he is developing the program online so patients - including veterans - across the country can access treatment from their homes.

Amir said he began researching the causes of anxiety more than 10 years ago, when he was still employed by the University.

He said he developed the program based on research that proved attention biases are important indicators of anxiety, meaning that people with anxiety have the tendency to focus their attention on negative or threatening stimuli.

"Imagine you are speaking in public and someone in the audience yawns," Amir said. "A person with anxiety would probably focus only on that person yawning and start thinking negatively about themselves and their speaking abilities."

Amir said he developed and tested a computer program that would interrupt that tendency in patients by diverting their attention from negative stimuli to neutral stimuli.

The program works by flashing two human faces across a screen - one neutral and one negative.

The participant then is prompted with a decision between two letters, and their response time indicates their ability to avoid reacting to the negative face.

As the participant continues to test, the ability to avoid the negative face improves and eventually, Amir said, the training helps the participant avoid stress-inducing stimuli in other contexts.

Amir said he hoped the government will use his program because many doctors and patients are hesitant to trust his data findings.

"It is hard to get grants or get published," Amir said. "People will say, this data looks really nice, but I just don't believe it. So we just keep testing."

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