Passing on the half-empty glass: A transgenerational study of interpretation biases in children at risk for depression and their parents with depression.

Abstract

Children of parents with a history of depression have an increased risk of developing depression themselves. The present study investigated the role of interpretation biases (that have been found in adults and adolescents with depression but have rarely been examined in at-risk youth) in the transgenerational transmission of depression risk. Interpretation biases were assessed with two experimental tasks: Ambiguous Scenarios Task (AST) and Scrambled Sentences Task (SST) in 9 -14-year-old children of parents with a history of depression (high risk; n ϭ 43) in comparison to children of parents with no history of mental disorders (low risk; n ϭ 35). Interpretation biases were also compared between the two groups of parents and relationships between children's and parents' bias scores were examined. As expected, we found more negative interpretation biases in high-risk children compared to low-risk children as well as in parents with a history of depression compared to never-depressed parents (assessed via the SST but not the AST). However, transgenerational correlations were only found for the AST. Our results indicate that negative interpretation biases are present in youth at risk for depression, possibly representing a cognitive vulnerability for the development of depression. Moreover, different measures of interpretation bias seemed to capture different aspects of biased processing with the more implicit measure (SST) being a more valid indicator of depressive processing.

“I Am a Total…Loser” – The Role of Interpretation Biases in Youth Depression

“…With respect to the first aim of the study, we expected to find more negative interpretation biases in children and adolescents with MD in comparison to healthy children and adolescents (both high- and low-risk youth), based on theoretical predictions (e.g., Disner et al 2011 ) and previous findings (Orchard et al 2016b ; Micco et al 2014 ). Regarding the second aim, we expected negative interpretation biases to be to some extent present in youth at high risk for depression compared to youth at low risk for depression (corresponding to our previous results, Sfärlea et al 2019 ; as well as Dearing and Gotlib 2009 ; Goodman and Gotlib 1999 ), but to be more pronounced in depressed versus high-risk youth (as found for memory biases; Fattahi Asl et al 2015 ).…”

“…The proportion of negatively resolved sentences indicates the interpretation bias. Applying two experimental measures of interpretation bias allows the examination of different aspects of interpretation, with the AST presumably measuring a more conscious and explicit aspect and the SST capturing a more automatic and implicit aspect (Sfärlea et al 2019 ). Both tasks have already been used in adolescent samples (e.g., de Voogd et al 2017 ; Burnett Heyes et al 2017 ) where they demonstrated at least acceptable reliability (Micco et al 2014 ; Sfärlea et al 2019 ).…”

“…Children and adolescents with MD were compared to two groups of non-depressed children and adolescents that varied in their risk for depression: children of parents with a history of depression, who are known to have an increased risk for MD themselves (e.g., Weissman et al 2006 ) and children of parents with no history of depression or any other mental disorder, who have a low risk for depressive disorders. This allowed us to pursue the second aim of our study: to determine the extent to which interpretation biases are more pronounced in currently depressed youth compared to at-risk youth (that have been found to be characterized by more negative interpretation biases than youth at low risk for depression; Dearing and Gotlib 2009 ; Sfärlea et al 2019 ). While negative interpretation biases in children and adolescents at high risk for depression indicate that these biases might be cognitive vulnerabilities or risk factors contributing to the development of depression (as suggested by theoretical models, e.g., Disner et al 2011 ), even more pronounced interpretation biases in currently depressed children and adolescents indicate that these biases might be exacerbated as a consequence of depressive symptomatology.…”

Risk of Depression in the Offspring of Parents with Depression: The Role of Emotion Regulation, Cognitive Style, Parenting and Life Events

“…Nevertheless, few studies have investigated the role of multiple cognitive, affective, parenting and environmental risk factors in children of parents with depression. The current study investigates the presence of these four factors in a convenience sample of children and their parents recruited for a preventive intervention and an experimental study [51,52]. The first aim is to replicate the finding that children of depressed versus non-depressed parents have an increased risk of psychopathology.…”

Cognitive Bias Under Adverse and Rewarding Conditions: A Systematic Review of Rodent Studies

“…This results in more negatively framed sentences among the alternative sentences that could be formed compared to those produced by healthy subjects. This is not only seen in depressed individuals, but also individuals who are at risk for developing depression (Sfarlea et al, 2019). While studies on interpretation bias in substance use disorder patients are lacking, it has been demonstrated that cannabis, opioid, and stimulant dependent subjects show a positive cognitive attention bias (Zhang et al, 2018).…”