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

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Abstract

Depressed individuals display biased attention for emotional information when stimuli are presented for relatively “long” (e.g., 1 s) 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 s 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.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 86 young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 years, either currently experiencing a major depressive episode or with no history of major depression. These participants were recruited from a large university and surrounding community in the southwestern United States. Students (n = 83) participated in exchange for credit in their introductory psychology course while community participants (n = 3) were compensated monetarily ($20) for their time. A two-step procedure was used to

Percent time attending to stimuli

A 6 (time segment: 0–5, 5–10, 10–15, 15–20, 20–25, 25–30) × 4 (stimulus valence: dysphoric, threat, positive, neutral) × 2(depression group: MDD, ND) mixed-plot analysis of variance examined whether depression group was associated with differential attention to stimuli category over time. Analyses indicated a significant main effect for valence, F(3, 174) = 11.47, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.17, that was qualified by a valence × depression group interaction, F(3, 174) = 3.21, p = 0.03, η2 = 0.05. There was also a

Discussion

We examined selective attention for emotional stimuli in clinically depressed and never depressed young adults. Uniquely, we also examined the unfolding of selective attention over time in these two groups. Depressed individuals spent more time attending to dysphoric stimuli than their never depressed counterparts. This group difference was relatively consistent over the course of the 30-s trial; that is, time did not moderate the association between depression group status and stimulus valence.

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    Preparation of this article was facilitated by a grant (R01MH076897) from the National Institute of Mental Health to Christopher Beevers.

    1

    Present address: Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

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