Study Links Depression in Children to Changes in Attention to Facial Emotions

As depressive symptoms increased, children whose mothers had no history of depression displayed less attention to happy faces, which could signify a loss of their ability to focus on positive stimuli. Brandon Gibb, director of Binghamton’s Mood Disorders Institute, indicated that this shift might erode a protective factor that helps children engage with happy expressions.

Conversely, for children of mothers with a history of major depressive disorder, increased depressive symptoms were linked to a heightened focus on sad faces. Gibb noted that these children, already at risk, found it increasingly difficult to divert their gaze from sadness as their own depressive symptoms grew.

Lead author Kelly Gair, a PhD student at Binghamton, suggested that maternal depression may influence children's emotional focus more profoundly. Children exposed to their mothers' displays of sadness might become more attuned to similar expressions during their own depressive experiences.

The study also explored whether attention changes occurred prior to or following the onset of depression. While previous research established a connection between depression and attentional bias toward sad faces, the new study is notable for examining this relationship in both directions over time. Gair emphasized the importance of understanding how attentional biases and depressive symptoms mutually predict changes in one another.

The Binghamton team plans to continue tracking these children into adolescence to determine how these attention patterns may influence future depression diagnoses. This research was published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, and is titled “Transactional relations between attentional biases for affective stimuli and depressive symptoms in offspring of mothers with and without major depressive disorder.”