Hawthorne Effect

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Hawthorne Effect

The phenomenon in which subjects of study alter their behavior simply because they are being studied. The Hawthorne effect is important in marketing. For example, test audience members may unintentionally skew their responses one way or another simply because they know they are part of a test audience. The concept originated in 1950 when analysis of a study from the 1920s and 1930s saw that productivity in a factory improved during a study of employees and declined after the study's conclusion.
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Quantitative evaluation of the clinical efficacy of attention bias modification treatment for anxiety disorders.
Also, this finding is in accordance with previous studies which showed that pre-exposure to food cues leads to attention bias towards delicious foods in restrained eaters, so that, higher degrees of pleasure from delicious foods leads to increase in attention bias towards those foods (26-28).
Research Review: attention bias modification (ABM): a novel treatment for anxiety disorders.
Attention bias is preferentially sustained by affective significance stimuli (17), which can be recorded by P200 and P300 registered in the frontal and parietal areas of the brain.
Gradually, the patient begins to focus on that stimulus instead, predicting that this is where the dot will appear - helping to normalize the attention bias pattern and reduce anxiety.
For example, behavioural inhibition in toddlers has predicted later social withdrawal in children who showed an attentional bias to threat at 5 years old [21], and attention bias to threat in adolescence has predicted adolescent social withdrawal [22].
It discusses emotion, attention, and information processing, including basic conceptual and theoretical issues, the selection of emotional stimuli, attentional bias in emotional disorders like depression and anxiety, affective bias in attention, and attention deficits in emotional disorders; cognitive content and process in emotional disorders, including distressing intrusive thoughts, interactionist approaches to stress, self-focused attention, attention manipulations, and whether attentional disorder is the cause or consequence of emotional problems; and a new theoretical model of attention and self-regulation that explains the development and maintenance of clinical problems and accounts for laboratory data on attention bias and performance and its clinical implications.
The results indicated that there was a significant difference for the HHA group, according to coping strategy, F(1, 63) = 5.59, p < .05; however, there was no significant difference in attention bias in the LHA group, F(1, 63) = 0.34, ns.