Attentional biases to emotional faces among women with a history of single episode versus recurrent major depression

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a highly prevalent psychiatric disorder, and recurrent depression is associated with severe and chronic impairment. Identifying markers of risk is imperative to improve our ability to predict which individuals are likely to experience a recurrence. According to cognitive theories, biases in attention for affectively-salient information may serve as one mechanism of risk. Existing research has combined participants with a single episode (sMDD) and those with recurrent MDD (rMDD); therefore, little is known about whether these biases track the severity of disease course. The current study examined attentional biases to facial displays of emotion among 115 women with a history of rMDD, sMDD, or no history of psychopathology using a passive viewing eye-tracking task. Women with rMDD exhibited significantly lower sustained attention to happy faces compared to both healthy controls and sMDD women. These results extend previous research on the presence of attentional avoidance of positive stimuli in individuals with a history of MDD and provide preliminary evidence that this bias is strongest among individuals with a history of rMDD.