A Binghamton University-led study suggests that changes in how children look at happy and sad faces over time track with depressive symptoms—and that the pattern differs depending on whether their mothers have a history of major depressive disorder.
Binghamton University researchers reported evidence that children’s visual attention to emotional facial expressions shifts alongside depressive symptoms—and that the direction of that shift depends on family history of depression.
The team followed 242 children and their mothers for two years, bringing families back for assessments every six months, according to Binghamton University materials published by ScienceDaily.
During each visit, children viewed pairs of faces on a screen: one neutral and one showing an emotional expression such as happy, sad, or angry, while eye-tracking recorded which faces held their attention and for how long.
The researchers reported different patterns by maternal clinical history. Among children whose mothers had a history of major depressive disorder (MDD), increases in children’s depressive symptoms were associated with greater attention to sad faces. For children whose mothers had no history of depression, increases in depressive symptoms were instead linked to spending less time attending to happy faces, the university summary said.
Brandon Gibb, director of Binghamton’s Mood Disorders Institute and a professor of psychology, said many of the vulnerabilities researchers study are still developing in childhood, making it possible to observe changes as they emerge.
Lead author Kelly Gair, a PhD student at Binghamton, said the study examined how attention patterns and depressive symptoms can be “mutually predicting” over time—an approach the researchers described as novel for this line of work.
The paper—titled “Transactional Relations Between Attentional Biases for Affective Stimuli and Depressive Symptoms in Offspring of Mothers With and Without Major Depressive Disorder”—was published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, according to the ScienceDaily release, which also lists the article’s DOI (10.1037/abn0001132).
