Visual attention to emotion in depression: Facilitation and withdrawal processes

Abstract

Attentional biases for sadness are integral to cognitive theories of depression, but do not emerge under all conditions. Some researchers have argued that depression is associated with delayed withdrawal from, but not facilitated initial allocation of attention toward, sadness. We compared two types of withdrawal processes in clinically depressed and non-depressed individuals: (1) withdrawal requiring overt eye movements during visual search; and (2) covert disengagement of attention in a modified cueing paradigm. We also examined initial allocation of attention towards emotion on the visual search task, allowing comparison of withdrawal and facilitation processes. As predicted, we found no evidence of facilitated attention towards sadness in depressed individuals. However, we also found no evidence of depression-linked differences in withdrawal of attention from sadness on either task, offering no support for the theory that depression is associated with withdrawal rather than initial facilitation of attention.

Keywords:

• Depression
• Visual attention
• Attentional bias
• Cognitive bias

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Melanie Dirks and Francisco Farach for valuable input on the design and implementation of these studies.

Notes

¹Other investigators have found a similar pattern of results in nonspatial allocation of attention. Research using negative affective priming tasks has shown that dysphoric individuals are slower to identify a negative target if it was immediately preceded by a trial with a negative distractor, indicating that dysphoric individuals have difficulty ignoring irrelevant, negative information (Joormann, 2004). Although the expected relationship between spatial and nonspatial allocation of attention is unclear, this pattern of results is broadly consistent with current interpretations of the spatial attention literature, namely that depressive biases emerge in the withdrawal, rather than the initial allocation, of attention.

²We did not examine covert engagement in the current study, because effects of depression on the operation of engagement processes are highly unlikely. While covert disengagement can be influenced by higher order factors, such as semantic relatedness (Stolz, 1996), and trait anxiety (Fox et al., 2001), covert engagement is thought to be “immune to the influences of higher level information” (Stolz, 1996, p. 200). Therefore, we focused on covert disengagement in the current study.

³Given the significant difference in age between the two groups, we examined whether statistically controlling for age affected any of the reported results. Entering age into the model did not change any findings. The results reported do not include age as a covariate.