Time course of selective attention in clinically depressed young adults: An eye tracking study
Open accessAbstract
Depressed individuals display biased attention for emotional information when stimuli are presented for relatively "long" (e.g., 1s) 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 30s 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.
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Distressed (depressed or anxious) individuals have attentional and memory biases toward negative stimuli and away from positive stimuli.
“Distressed (depressed or anxious) individuals have attentional and memory biases toward negative stimuli and away from positive stimuli (Burt et al., 1995; Mathews and MacLeod, 2005; Kellough et al., 2008; Disner et al., 2011).”
From Mindfulness Training Alters Emotional Memory Recall Compared to Active Controls: Support for an Emotional Information Processing Model of Mindfulness (2012) · cites this paper as Kellough et al., 2008
The Discussion reports that depressed young adults attended more to dysphoric images and less to positive images than never-depressed peers. The paper does not establish memory biases or the same pattern in anxious individuals; its mention of memory is part of a theoretical account, not a finding of this study. Page numbers are not provided in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.87)
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References 26 · Cited by 314
Research works printed but not linked: 11
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- Authors
- Kellough, J. L., Beevers, C. G., Ellis, A. J., & Wells, T. T.
- Affiliations
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
- Corresponding author
- Beevers, Christopher G.
- Venue
- Behaviour Research and Therapy
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2008-11
- Volume
- 46
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 1238-1243
- ISSN
- 0005-7967 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC2584153
- OpenAlex
- W2113090779
- Cited by
- 314
- References
- 26
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 30 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 21 · 2018: 27 · 2017: 19 · 2016: 28 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 17 · 2012: 15
- FWCI
- 10.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Behaviour Research and Therapy (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH076897)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
- Keywords
- depression, attentional bias, sustained attention, emotional stimuli, young adults, visual gaze, time course of attention, depression maintenance
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Attention, Depressive Disorder, Major, Major Depressive Disorder, Eye Movements, Female, Fixation, Ocular, Humans, Male, Psychiatric Status Rating Scales, Eye Movement Measurements, Young Adult
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