smile. Frown. Children’s attention-grabbing facial expressions can reveal important clues about their mental health.
A new study from Binghamton University, State University of New York, suggests that depression may affect how children respond to emotional facial expressions, such as happy or sad faces. The study also found that these attention patterns differed depending on whether the child had a family history of depression.
Researchers at Binghamton University’s Mood Disorders Institute are focused on understanding how depression develops in childhood and adolescence. They are investigating how factors such as family history and emotional experiences contribute to future risk of depression. By identifying these patterns early, scientists hope to improve efforts to recognize and prevent depression before it becomes more severe.
“Most of the vulnerabilities that we focus on are still developing during this period,” said Brandon Gibb, director of the Mood Disorders Research Institute and distinguished professor of psychology at the State University of New York. “You can capture things as they are being developed, rather than studying them after they have already been developed and are fairly stable.”
How depression and attention affect each other
Previous research has associated depression with increased attention to sad facial expressions. However, their effects are generally small, and researchers do not know whether these attentional patterns contribute to or are a consequence of depression.
This new study is the first to examine how children’s depressive symptoms and attentional biases interact over time.
“The real novelty is that we focused on these transactional relationships,” said Kelly Gale, a doctoral student at Binghamton University and lead author of the paper. “We observed how attentional biases and depressive symptoms predicted each other across time. This is particularly novel and has never been done before.”
To investigate these relationships, Gale, Gibb, and co-researcher Leslie A. Brick of the University of New Mexico followed 242 children and their mothers for two years. Participants returned every six months for evaluation.
During each visit, children saw paired faces on the screen. One face showed a neutral expression and the other face showed an emotional expression (happy, sad, or angry). Eye-tracking technology measured which faces caught the children’s attention and how long they focused on them.
Children in the study watched faces conveying different emotions on a screen, and eye-tracking technology recorded where their attention wandered. Photo credit: NimStim facial expression set (Tottenham et al., 2009).
Family history shapes attention to emotional faces
The results showed that the impact of increased depressive symptoms on children’s attention differed depending on their family background.
Among children whose mothers had a history of major depressive disorder, progression of depressive symptoms was associated with increased attention to sad faces.
“The more children who are already at risk experience depression themselves, the less able they are to distract themselves from sad events around them,” Gibb says.
Geir pointed out that depression can have a significant impact on what people perceive in their environment.
“We know that when we’re depressed, what we focus on changes,” Gale said. “Our findings suggest that these changes may be more long-term and may vary by family history. One idea is that children of mothers with depression may display more sad facial expressions from interactions with their mothers, and that these types of facial expressions may become more prominent when they experience depression themselves, so their attention becomes increasingly fixated on sad facial expressions.”
Different patterns for low-risk children
The pattern was different among children whose mothers had no history of depression.
When these children experienced increased depressive symptoms, they tended to spend less time paying attention to happy faces.
“What’s happening in low-risk children is that the experience of depression erodes the protective factor of how much attention they pay to happy faces,” Gibb says.
Researchers are now continuing to track children as they head into adolescence. The goal is to determine whether these attentional patterns contribute to a higher likelihood of developing clinical depression later in life.
The study, “The transactional relationship between attentional bias toward emotional stimuli and depressive symptoms in offspring of mothers with and without major depressive disorder,” Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Sciences.
