An Eye-Tracking Study of Attention Biases in Children at High Familial Risk for Depression and Their Parents with Depression.

Attention biases (AB) are a core component of cognitive models of depression yet it is unclear what role they play in the transgenerational transmission of depression. 44 children (9-14 years) with a high familial risk of depression (HR) were compared on multiple measures of AB with 36 children with a low familial risk of depression (LR). Their parents: 44 adults with a history of depression (HD) and 36 adults with no history of psychiatric disorder (ND) were also compared. There was no evidence of group differences in AB; neither between the HR and LR children, nor between HD and ND parents. There was no evidence of a correlation between parent and child AB. The internal consistency of the tasks varied greatly. The Dot-Probe Task showed unacceptable reliability whereas the behavioral index of the Visual-Search Task and an eye-tracking index of the Passive-Viewing Task showed better reliability. There was little correlation between the AB tasks and the tasks showed minimal convergence with symptoms of depression or anxiety. The null-findings of the current study contradict our expectations and much of the previous literature. They may be due to the poor psychometric properties associated with some of the AB indices, the unreliability of AB in general, or the relatively modest sample size. The poor reliability of the tasks in our sample suggest caution should be taken when interpreting the positive findings of previous studies which have used similar methods and populations.

Emotion Regulation as a Mediator in the Relationship Between Cognitive Biases and Depressive Symptoms in Depressed, At-risk and Healthy Children and Adolescents.

Contemporary cognitive models of depression propose that cognitive biases for negative information at the level of attention (attention biases; AB) and interpretation (interpretation biases; IB) increase depression risk by promoting maladaptive emotion regulation (ER). So far, empirical support testing interactions between these variables is restricted to non-clinical and clinical adult samples. The aim of the current study was to extend these findings to a sample of children and adolescents. This cross-sectional study included 109 children aged 9-14 years who completed behavioural measures of AB (passive-viewing task) and IB (scrambled sentences task) as well as self-report measures of ER and depressive symptoms. In order to maximize the variance in these outcomes we included participants with a clinical diagnosis of depression as well as non-depressed youth with an elevated familial risk of depression and non-depressed youth with a low familial risk of depression. Path model analysis indicated that all variables (AB, IB, adaptive and maladaptive ER) had a direct effect on depressive symptoms. IB and AB also had significant indirect effects on depressive symptoms via maladaptive and adaptive ER. These findings provide initial support for the role of ER as a mediator between cognitive biases and depressive symptoms and provide the foundations for future experimental and longitudinal studies. In contrast to studies in adult samples, both adaptive as well as maladaptive ER mediated the effect of cognitive biases on depressive symptoms. This suggests potentially developmental differences in the role of ER across the lifespan.