A new eye-tracking study reveals how depression shapes children’s attention to happy and sad faces.
Depression may change which emotions hold a child’s attention, with the pattern differing according to whether their mother has experienced depression. A study from Binghamton University, State University of New York, found that increasing depressive symptoms were associated with greater attention to sad faces in some children and less attention to happy faces in others.
Researchers followed 242 children and their mothers for two years, assessing them every six months. During each visit, children viewed pairs of faces on a screen. One face had a neutral expression, while the other looked happy, sad, or angry. Eye-tracking technology recorded how much attention the children paid to each face. The research team included Leslie A. Brick of the University of New Mexico.
Attention shifts differ with family history
Among children whose mothers had no history of depression, increases in depressive symptoms were followed by less attention to happy faces. Brandon Gibb, director of Binghamton’s Mood Disorders Institute and SUNY distinguished professor of psychology, sees that shift as a possible loss of something beneficial.
“In our lower-risk children, what seems to be happening is that experiences of depression are eroding a protective factor, which is how much they pay attention to happy faces,” Gibb said.
For children whose mothers had a history of major depressive disorder, increasing symptoms were associated with attention becoming more focused on sad faces.
“For those who are already at risk, the more these children experience depression themselves, the more they lose their ability to pull their attention away from the sad things around them,” Gibb said.
Kelly Gair, a PhD student at Binghamton and the paper’s lead author, offered one possible explanation for why a mother’s history of depression might matter.
“We know that when you’re depressed, it changes what you pay attention to,” Gair said. “Our results suggest that these changes may be more long-lasting and may differ depending on family history. One thought is that for children of mothers with depression, who are exposed to more facial displays of sadness from interactions with their mom, these types of facial expressions become even more salient when they experience depression themselves, so their attention becomes increasingly stuck on sad expressions.”
Does attention change before or after depression?
Earlier studies had linked depression with attention to sad faces, although the effects were small. Whether these attention patterns contribute to depression or develop as a consequence of it has remained unclear. By repeatedly assessing the children, the Binghamton team could examine whether symptoms predicted later changes in attention and whether attention patterns predicted later changes in symptoms. The study was the first to investigate those relationships in both directions over time in children.
“The real novel piece is that we looked at these transactional relations,” said Gair. “Between attentional biases and depressive symptoms, we looked at the way that they were mutually predicting one another across the time points, which is especially novel and hasn’t been done before.”
“Most of the vulnerabilities that we focus on are still developing during this time period,” said Gibb. “You can catch things as they’re developing, rather than only studying them once they’re already there and pretty stable.”
The researchers are continuing to follow the children into adolescence to examine how these attention patterns might increase their risk of being diagnosed with depression as they get older.
Reference: “Transactional relations between attentional biases for affective stimuli and depressive symptoms in offspring of mothers with and without major depressive disorder” by Kelly A. Gair, Leslie A. Brick and Brandon E. Gibb, Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.
DOI: 10.1037/abn0001132
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