Depression and dysphoria are associated with attention and memory biases for emotional information (Williams et al. 1997; Yiend in Cogn Emot 24:3-47, 2010), which are postulated to reflect stable vulnerability factors for the development and recurrence of depression (Gotlib and Joormann in Annu Rev Clin Psychol 6:285-312, 2010). The present study looked for evidence of attention and memory biases in individuals with a self-reported history of depression, compared to individuals with dysphoria and individuals with no history of depression. Participants viewed sets of depression-related, anxiety-related, positive, and neutral images while their eye fixations were tracked and recorded. Incidental recognition of the images was assessed 7 days later. Consistent with previous studies (Kellough et al. in Behav Res Therapy 46:1238-1243 Sears et al. in Cogn Emot 24:1349-1368, 2010, dysphoric individuals spent significantly less time attending to positive images than never depressed individuals, and it was also found that previously depressed individuals exhibited the same attentional bias. Previously depressed individuals also attended to anxiety-related images more than never depressed individuals. A bias in the initial orienting of attention was observed, with previously depressed and dysphoric individuals orienting to depression-images more frequently than never depressed participants. The recognition memory data showed that previously depressed and dysphoric individuals had poorer memory than never depressed individuals, but there was no evidence of a memory bias for either group. Implications for cognitive models of depression and depression vulnerability are discussed.
Cognitive theories of anxiety disorders and depression posit that attentional biases play a role in the development, maintenance, and recurrence of these disorders. Several paradigms have been used to examine attentional biases in anxiety and depression, but information on the reliability of different attentional bias indices is limited. In this study we examined the internal consistency and 6-month test-retest reliability of attentional bias indices derived from a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm. Participants completed two versions of an eye-tracking task-one that used naturalistic images as stimuli, and one that used face images. In both tasks, participants viewed displays of four images, each display consisting of one threat image, one sad image, one positive/happy image, and one neutral image. The internal consistency of the fixation indices (dwell time and number of fixations) for threat, sad, and positive images over the full 8-s display was moderate to excellent. When the 8-s display was divided into 2-s intervals, the dwell times for the 0-to 2-s and 2-to 4-s intervals showed lower reliability, particularly for the face images. The attentional bias indices for the naturalistic images showed adequate to good stability over the test-retest period, whereas the test-retest reliability estimates for the face images were in the low to moderate range. The implications of these results for attentional bias research are discussed.
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