Inhibition Characteristics Of Attentional Bias For Emotional Faces In Depressed Individuals

Three paradigms including the Stroop paradigm, cue-target and negative priming were used to investigate the attention bias of depression in terms of inhibition mechanism, and to explore the relationship between depression levels and attentional bias. The subjects were divided into four groups: control group, depressive position group, mild depression group and major depression group. Attentional bias refers to individuals high sensitivity accompanied by selective attention to specific stimuli. The conclusions were as follows:(1)In the cue-target task, when the SOA was 14ms, all four groups had IOR (inhibition of return) effect for happy faces; for sad faces, the major depression group had cue effect and the other three groups had IOR effect. When the SOA was 250ms, all four groups had IOR effect for sad faces; and there is a significant difference between the 2 depression groups and the other 2 groups. When the SOA was 750ms, for sad faces the control group and depressive position group had IOR effect and the 2 depression groups had cue effect.(2)In the Stroop task, in terms of word nature judgment, the RT of all four groups showed significant difference. The RT of control group was the lowest. The reaction time increased as the degree of depression. The happy faces and the sad faces all exert Interference Effects on the judgment of speech character. The influence of sad faces is higher than the influence of happy faces. When we compare the two depression groups, the Interference Effects of happy faces and the sad faces have significant difference.(3)In the negative priming task, both the subjects of mild depression group and the Major depressive disorders group emerge the facilitation effect and inadequate ability of distracter inhibition when facing the sad faces.(4)These results show that, the attention bias of depression is not generated from the single effect of Facilitation mechanism or Inhibitory mechanism. Although the Depressive Position individual and depression individual have the same emotional stimuli processing tendency, they have a nature difference. The processing tendency of Depressive Position individual is state characteristic, the other is trait characteristic.