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Attentional processing in clinically depressed subjects: A longitudinal investigation

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Abstract

The present study was designed to examine attentional biases in information processing in depressed subjects both during periods of depression and following recovery. On two occasions, approximately 3 months apart, clinically depressed and nondepressed subjects completed a focused-attention dichotic listening task and a concurrent light-probe reaction-time task. As predicted, whereas depressed subjects took longer to respond to light probes when negative-content words were presented in the unattended channel of the dichotic tape than they did when either positive- or neutral-content words were presented, nondepressed subjects' reaction times did not differ across the three conditions. Results from the second session indicated that recovered subjects no longer demonstrated attentional biases. Specifically, the performance of recovered depressed subjects was less disrupted by the negative-content stimuli. These findings suggest that accessibility to negative stimuli is facilitated only during periods of depression, and that such accessibility is unlikely to provide the method whereby cognitive schemata exert a vulnerability for future depressions.

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Author notes

  1. Scott B. McCabe

    Present address: Northwestern University, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, N6A 5C2, London, Ontario, Canada

    Scott B. McCabe & Ian H. Gotlib

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  1. Scott B. McCabe
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  2. Ian H. Gotlib
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Additional information

The research reported in this paper was facilitated by a Senior Research Fellowship from the Ontario Mental Health Foundation to Ian H. Gotlib. The authors express their appreciation to Dr. Valerie Whiffen and Cheryl McCabe for serving as second raters in the reliability aspects of this study.

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McCabe, S.B., Gotlib, I.H. Attentional processing in clinically depressed subjects: A longitudinal investigation. Cogn Ther Res 17, 359–377 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01177660

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