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

Abstract

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

“…Data were collected within a broader project on cognitive biases in youth depression (Platt, 2017). Data from the same project are reported elsewhere in relation to attention (Platt et al, 2021) and interpretation (Sfärlea et al, 2019b) biases in at-risk youth, as well as interpretation biases in clinicallydepressed youth (Sfärlea et al, 2020).…”

“…Clinically-depressed youth, youth with an elevated familial risk of depression and youth with a low familial risk of depression were included in order to maximise variation (recommended by Everaert et al, 2017a). Since the psychometric properties of behavioural measures of cognitive biases are generally poor (Gibb et al, 2016;LeMoult & Gotlib, 2019), measures which had previously shown good reliability were selected (Platt et al, 2021;Sfärlea et al, 2019b). A measure of ER which included sub-scales for adaptive and maladaptive ER was chosen, since it is unclear whether mediating effects are specific to rumination (Everaert et al, 2017a) or also apply to adaptive ER strategies (Sanchez et al, 2016).…”

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

“…Data from tasks comparing AB in MD, HR and LR youth are presented here. Data from interpretation bias tasks [38,44] and tasks comparing AB in children and parents of HR and LR groups [36] are presented elsewhere. To ensure quality of our tasks and results, we determined psychometric properties of each task and parameter and only report those with acceptable reliabilities (PVT, VST).…”

“…Additionally, psychometric properties of the PVT have been found acceptable in adults [27,35] and in youth [36]. To our knowledge, only two studies have employed this paradigm to investigate bias in sustained attention in youth depression: one found AB away from sad faces in youth with MD [21], the other found AB towards sad faces in youth at risk for MD, moderated by genetical differences in HPA-axis reactivity [24].…”

“…Participants with MD were recruited mainly at a University Hospital for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Germany, some by a cooperating licensed psychotherapist and some responded to public adverts. Data of the LR and HR groups was largely (87%) derived from a study evaluating the transgenerational transmission of cognitive biases [36,38] in which children and adolescents participated with one of their parents. N = 29 HR participants were recruited from a previous study on a preventive intervention for this particular risk group [48], n = 12 of them had taken part in the programme by the time they were tested in the present study.…”