Biased Maintenance of Attention on Sad Faces in Clinically Depressed Youth: An Eye-Tracking Study

The role of negative attention biases (AB), central to cognitive models of adult depression, is yet unclear in youth depression. We investigated negative AB in depressed compared to healthy youth and tested whether AB are more pronounced in depressed than at-risk youth. Negative AB was assessed for sad and angry faces with an eye-tracking paradigm [Passive Viewing Task (PVT)] and a behavioural task [Visual Search Task (VST)], comparing three groups of 9-14-year-olds: youth with major depression (MD; n = 32), youth with depressed parents (high-risk; HR; n = 49) and youth with healthy parents (low-risk; LR; n = 42). The PVT revealed MD participants to maintain attention longer on sad faces compared to HR, but not LR participants. This AB correlated positively with depressive symptoms. The VST revealed no group differences. Our results provide preliminary evidence for a negative AB in maintenance of attention on disorder-specific emotional information in depressed compared to at-risk youth.

Maternal Response to Positive Affect Moderates the Impact of Familial Risk for Depression on Ventral Striatal Response to Winning Reward in 6- to 8-Year-Old Children

BACKGROUND

A growing body of research has demonstrated that adolescent offspring of depressed parents show diminished responding in the ventral striatum to reward. More recent work has suggested that altered reward responding may emerge earlier than adolescence in offspring at familial risk for depression, although factors associated with neural alterations in childhood remain poorly understood.

METHODS

We tested whether 6- to 8-year-old children, 49% at heightened risk for depression via maternal history, showed altered neural responding to winning reward. We evaluated whether maternal socialization of positive emotion moderated the association between familial risk and child neural response to reward. Participants were 49 children 6 to 8 years of age (24 with a maternal history of recurrent or chronic depression, 25 with no maternal history of any psychiatric disorder). Children underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while completing the Doors Guessing Task, a widely used reward guessing task. Mothers reported their use of encouraging and dampening responses to child positive affect.

RESULTS

Findings demonstrated that children at high familial risk for depression showed lower ventral striatum responding to winning reward relative to low-risk children, but only when mothers used less encouragement or greater dampening responses to their child's positive emotion expressions.

CONCLUSIONS

Neural reward alterations in the ventral striatum may emerge earlier than previously thought, as early as 6 to 8 years of age, specifically in the context of maternal discouragement of child positive emotions. Clinical interventions that focus on coaching mothers on how to encourage child positive emotions may be beneficial for supporting child reward-related brain development.

The Role of Religiosity in Families at High Risk for Depression

BACKGROUND

About forty years ago we began a study of the offspring of depressed (high-risk) and not depressed (low-risk) parents, matched for age and gender, from the same community. We interviewed all of their biological children, blind to the clinical status of the parents. Over the years, we returned to re-interview the families at baseline, 2, 10, 20, 25 30, and 35 years. As the years went by and the sample grew up, we also interviewed the third generation, the grandchildren. As technology became available, we included measures of electrophysiology and magnetic resonance imaging in order to better understand the mechanisms of risk. At the 10-year follow up, we included measures of religion and spirituality - namely, personal religious/spiritual importance and frequency of religious service attendance. We included these measures in all subsequent waves including a more extensive follow up of religious beliefs at the 35-year follow up.

ISSUES OF FOCUS

This paper describes the study design and highlights the key findings of the role of religious/spiritual belief in the transmission and endurance of depression using clinical and biological approaches.

METHODS

We describe study findings based on clinical measures, as well as physiological measures that employed electrophysiology and magnetic resonance imaging.

RESULTS

Taken together, the findings suggest that religiosity/spirituality is protective against depression in high-risk individuals at both clinical and physiological levels.

IMPLICATIONS

The findings suggest religiosity interacts with both culture and biology in its impact on depression.