ABSTRACT
Situational attentional refocusing (SAR; Wells, 2000; Wells & Papageorgiou, 1998) is a treatment strategy designed to reverse the current maladaptive attentional strategies a person adopts in a stressful context. Although the types of attentional strategy may vary between patients and across disorders, maladaptive attentional strategies prevent the person from modifying their knowledge. Typical dysfunctional attentional strategies include both excessive self-focus seen in social phobia and inappropriate threat monitoring that so often characterizes PTSD or OCD.
