Time course of selective attention in clinically depressed young adults: An eye tracking study

Abstract

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...

Attention, interpretation, and memory biases in subclinical depression: A proof-of-principle test of the combined cognitive biases hypothesis.

“…For this study, the total fixation frequency (i.e., total number of fixations) and total fixation duration (i.e., summation of the duration across fixations) on the target words in the scrambled sentences (i.e., the areas of interest) served as the key dependent variables. These parameters are commonly reported indices of attention bias sensitive to individual differences related to depression (e.g., Kellough, Beevers, Ellis, & Wells, 2008;Leyman, De Raedt, Vaeyens, & Philippaerts, 2011) and are assumed to reflect different mechanisms of attention (see Armstrong & Olatunji, 2012). More specifically, the ATTENTION, INTERPRETATION, AND MEMORY BIASES 11 fixation frequency parameter indexes (re)orienting of attention (cf.…”

Attentional biases toward emotional images in the different episodes of bipolar disorder: An eye-tracking study

“…Two of the above-cited studies also found that depressed individuals paid more attention to sad stimuli relative to healthy controls (Eizenman et al, 2003;Kellough et al, 2008). However, no study found differences in the eye-gaze patterns related to threatening stimuli between depressed and non-depressed individuals (Armstrong and Olatunji, 2012).…”

“…Of particular relevance here is the free-viewing task, in which participants are required to focus on a central fixation point, and then asked to scan/re-scan several stimuli (2-4 stimuli, e.g., images, faces, or words) presented simultaneously, depicting differing valences (happy, sad, threat or neutral) for around 10-30 s. A number of studies assessed the maintenance of attention over the entire trial (e.g., by measuring the total fixation time on each image; see Eizenman et al, 2003;Kellough et al, 2008;Leyman et al, 2011;Sears et al, 2010Sears et al, , 2011Ellis et al, 2011). Depressed individuals attended less to happy stimuli than nondepressed individuals (i.e., an "anhedonic bias" was found; Kellough et al, 2008;Leyman et al, 2011;Sears et al, 2010Sears et al, , 2011Ellis et al, 2011).…”

“…However, no study found differences in the eye-gaze patterns related to threatening stimuli between depressed and non-depressed individuals (Armstrong and Olatunji, 2012). To determine the presence of attentional biases in the earliest stages of information processing, several studies examined the location of first fixation on a particular image (Kellough et al, 2008;Sears et al, 2010Sears et al, , 2011. Moreover, albeit not conclusively, individuals with MDD tended to orient their initial fixation to happy stimuli less frequently than healthy controls (Armstrong and Olatunji, 2012).…”

“…To examine the emotional modulation of attentional processing in individuals along the three episodes of BD, we used a similar paradigm to that employed by Kellough et al (2008). Participants were simultaneously presented with four images (neutral, dysphoric, happy, and threatening).…”