Attentional biases to emotional faces among women with a history of single episode versus recurrent major depression

ABSTRACT

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a highly prevalent psychiatric disorder, and recurrent depression is associated with severe and chronic impairment. Identifying markers of risk is imperative to improve our ability to predict which individuals are likely to experience a recurrence. According to cognitive theories, biases in attention for affectively-salient information may serve as one mechanism of risk. Existing research has combined participants with a single episode (sMDD) and those with recurrent MDD (rMDD); therefore, little is known about whether these biases track the severity of disease course. The current study examined attentional biases to facial displays of emotion among 115 women with a history of rMDD, sMDD, or no history of psychopathology using a passive viewing eye-tracking task. Women with rMDD exhibited significantly lower sustained attention to happy faces compared to both healthy controls and sMDD women. These results extend previous research on the presence of attentional avoidance of positive stimuli in individuals with a history of MDD and provide preliminary evidence that this bias is strongest among individuals with a history of rMDD.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention bias
• recurrent depression
• eye tracking

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Katie Burkhouse, Mary Woody, Aliona Tsypes, Cope Feurer, Kiera James, Sydney Meadows, Michael Van Wie, Devra Alper, Eric Funk, Effua Sosoo, Nathan Hall, Aholibama Lopez, and Kristina Wong for their help in conducting assessments for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On average, participants attended to the faces for 70.91% (SD = 1.83%) of the total trial time. There were no group differences in time spent not attending to the faces.

2 The larger study examined correlates of depression and anxiety among parents and children recruited from the community. The only inclusion criteria for parents was being the biological parent of a 7–11-year-old. The only previous publication from this study using the passive viewing task focused on attentional biases associated with brooding rumination in currently nondepressed adults (Owens & Gibb, 2017).

3 Although no a priori power analyses were conducted, the observed power for the MDD history × Emotion and MDD history × Emotion × Epoch interactions were .91 and .96, respectively, suggesting adequate power for the analyses of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health under grant MH098060 awarded to B.E. Gibb.