Understanding associations between negatively biased attention and depression and social anxiety: positively biased attention is key

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives: Although research supports the premise that depressed and socially anxious individuals direct attention preferentially toward negative emotional cues, little is known about how attention to positive emotional cues might modulate this negative attention bias risk process. The purpose of this study was to determine if associations between attention biases to sad and angry faces and depression and social anxiety symptoms, respectively, would be strongest in individuals who also show biased attention away from happy faces.

Methods: Young adults (N = 151; 79% female; M = 19.63 years) completed self-report measures of depression and social anxiety symptoms and a dot probe task to assess attention biases to happy, sad, and angry facial expressions.

Results: Attention bias to happy faces moderated associations between attention to negatively valenced faces and psychopathology symptoms. However, attention bias toward sad faces was positively and significantly related to depression symptoms only for individuals who also selectively attended toward happy faces. Similarly, attention bias toward angry faces was positively and significantly associated with social anxiety symptoms only for individuals who also selectively attended toward happy faces.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that individuals with high levels of depression or social anxiety symptoms attend preferentially to emotional stimuli across valences.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention bias
• happiness
• depression
• social anxiety
• attentional flexibility

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants who generously gave of their time to the study and the many research assistants who contributed to the overall conduct of the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sarah E. Garcia http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5259-6676

Notes

1. Regression models testing hypotheses were also conducted including all participants. The pattern of significance of findings remained largely the same and sizes of effects were quite similar in magnitude to those reported in the main text. However, in the model predicting social anxiety scores from attention bias at 1500 ms, the interaction between Angry Bias and Happy Bias trended toward significance. These results can be found in Tables 2 and 3 in the Supplementary Material.

2. Regression models testing hypotheses were also conducted excluding angry bias from models predicting depression and excluding sad bias from models predicting social anxiety. The pattern of significance of findings remained the same and sizes of effects were very similar in magnitude to those reported in the main text. These results can be found in Tables 4 and 5 in the Supplementary Material.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.