Psychological adjustment to breast cancer: Automatic and controlled responses to stress

This study investigated the role of controlled and automatic responses to stress following a breast cancer diagnosis by combining self-report measures of coping and psychological distress and experimental measures of attention. Within 3 months of receiving a primary diagnosis of breast cancer, 135 women completed questionnaires assessing affect, responses to stress, and responded to a modified probe position task to measure supraliminal (conscious) and subliminal (non-conscious) attentional bias to cancer words and social threat words. Participants selectively attended to supraliminal cancer-related words and avoided subliminal cancer-related words; however, they showed no attentional bias toward or away from social threat words. An attentional bias toward supraliminal cancer-related words was associated with lower self-reported symptoms of emotional distress and higher levels of positive affect and engagement coping. This study demonstrates the utility of combining experimental and self-report methods to understand the full range of responses to stress following a breast cancer diagnosis.