Attention for emotional facial expressions in dysphoria: An eye-movement registration study

Former research demonstrated that depression is associated with dysfunctional attentional processing of emotional information. Most studies examined this bias by registration of response latencies. The present study employed an ecologically valid measurement of attentive processing, using eye-moveme...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition and emotion 2011-01, Vol.25 (1), p.111-120
Main Authors: Leyman, Lemke, De Raedt, Rudi, Vaeyens, Roel, Philippaerts, Renaat M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Attention - physiology
Attentional bias
Biological and medical sciences
Depression
Depression - physiopathology
Emotions - physiology
Eye movements
Facial Expression
Facial expressions
Female
Fixation
Fixation, Ocular - physiology
Humans
Medical sciences
Mood disorders
Photic Stimulation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Response latency
Visual Perception
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Summary:Former research demonstrated that depression is associated with dysfunctional attentional processing of emotional information. Most studies examined this bias by registration of response latencies. The present study employed an ecologically valid measurement of attentive processing, using eye-movement registration. Dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants viewed slides presenting sad, angry, happy and neutral facial expressions. For each type of expression, three components of visual attention were analysed: the relative fixation frequency, fixation time and glance duration. Attentional biases were also investigated for inverted facial expressions to ensure that they were not related to eye-catching facial features. Results indicated that non-dysphoric individuals were characterised by longer fixating and dwelling on happy faces. Dysphoric individuals demonstrated a longer dwelling on sad and neutral faces. These results were not found for inverted facial expressions. The present findings are in line with the assumption that depression is associated with a prolonged attentional elaboration on negative information.
ISSN:0269-9931
1464-0600
DOI:10.1080/02699931003593827