Depressed individuals display biased attention for emotional information when stimuli are presented for relatively "long" (e.g., 1 second) durations. The current study examined whether attentional biases are sustained over a much longer period. Specifically, clinically depressed and never depressed young adults simultaneously viewed images from four emotion categories (sad, threat, positive, neutral) for 30 seconds while line of visual gaze was assessed. Depressed individuals spent significantly more time viewing dysphoric images and less time viewing positive images than their never depressed counterparts. Time course analyses indicated that these biases were maintained over the course of the trial. Results suggest that depressed participants' attentional biases for dysphoric information are sustained for relatively long periods even when other emotional stimuli are present. Mood congruent information-processing biases appear to be a robust feature of depression and may have an important role in the maintenance of the disorder.
KeywordsCognitive bias; information processing; depression maintenance; attention; eye movements Cognitive theories of depression postulate that depressed individuals are characterized by negative biases in information processing (e.g., Beck, 1976). In general, these models propose that biases in attention, perception, and memory serve to maintain a major depressive episode. In regard to attention, depressed individuals are expected to selectively attend to negative stimuli and filter out positive stimuli. This bias, in turn, is thought to contribute to the maintenance of the disorder.Numerous studies of attentional biases in depression have been conducted. Despite initial null findings (e.g., Mogg, Bradley, Williams, & Mathews 1993;MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986), more recent work has documented an association between depression and biased attention. For instance, Gotlib et al. (2004) reported an attentional bias for sad facial expressions in a clinically depressed sample using a dot probe task (Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joorman, 2004). Gotlib et al. (2004) and Joormann and Gotlib (2007) subsequently replicated this finding. Caseras, Garner, Bradley, and Mogg (2007) provided further evidence that dysphoric individuals maintained their gaze longer on negative pictures than non-dysphoric people.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Christopher G. Beevers, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, A8000, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail: beevers@psy.utexas.edu. Jennifer L. Kellough is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Southern California.Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production proc...
