There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
<div class="section">
<a class="named-anchor" id="S1">
<!--
named anchor
-->
</a>
<h5 class="section-title" id="d4788372e163">Background:</h5>
<p id="P3">Identification of reliable targets for therapeutic interventions is essential
for
developing evidence-based therapies. Attention biases toward negative-valenced information
and lack of protective positive bias toward positive-valenced stimuli have been implicated
in depression. However, extant research has typically used tasks with narrow stimuli
arrays and unknown or poor psychometric properties. Here, we recorded eye-tracking
data of depressed and non-depressed participants during a free viewing task to address
these limitations.
</p>
</div><div class="section">
<a class="named-anchor" id="S2">
<!--
named anchor
-->
</a>
<h5 class="section-title" id="d4788372e168">Methods:</h5>
<p id="P4">Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD;
<i>n</i> = 20) and undergraduate students with high (
<i>n</i> = 23) and low (
<i>n</i> = 20) levels of depression freely viewed 60 different face-based matrices
for six
seconds each. Each matrix included eight sad and eight happy facial expressions. Gaze
patterns on sad and happy areas of interest (AOIs) were explored. Internal consistency
for the entire sample and one-week test-retest reliability in the student sub-sample
were assessed.
</p>
</div><div class="section">
<a class="named-anchor" id="S3">
<!--
named anchor
-->
</a>
<h5 class="section-title" id="d4788372e182">Results:</h5>
<p id="P5">Compared to undergraduates with low levels of depression, patients with
MDD and students
with high levels of depression dwelled significantly longer on sad faces. Results
also showed a significantly longer dwell time on the happy AOI relative to the sad
AOI only in the low depression group. The two depressed groups dwelled equally on
the two AOIs. The task demonstrated high internal consistency and acceptable one-week
test-retest reliability.
</p>
</div><div class="section">
<a class="named-anchor" id="S4">
<!--
named anchor
-->
</a>
<h5 class="section-title" id="d4788372e187">Limitations:</h5>
<p id="P6">Only sad and happy facial expressions were used. Relative small sample
size.</p>
</div><div class="section">
<a class="named-anchor" id="S5">
<!--
named anchor
-->
</a>
<h5 class="section-title" id="d4788372e192">Conclusion:</h5>
<p id="P7">Relative to non-depressed participants, depressed participants showed prolonged
dwelling
on sad faces and lack of bias toward happy faces. These biases present viable targets
for gaze-contingent attention bias modification therapy.
</p>
</div>