Depressed Individuals Tend To Pay More Attention To Self-related Information Or Depression-related Information

Generally,depression is accompanied with impairment of cognitive function,which is shown as the attention bias to depression-related information of depressed individuals and the attention bias to self-related information of depressed individuals stronger than which of healthy individuals.At the same time,those attention biases have stages,which means depressed individuals are not attracted by depression-related information and self-related information in the initial stage,but once the their attention resources are put into those information,they are difficult to be distracted.At present,eye movements techniques and related paradigms,including the free viewing paradigm,which has higher ecological validity and can reflect the attention bias of the subjects more realistically,have been frequently used in the studies of the attention bias of depressed individuals.In this paper,the following three studies were designed for those two attention biases of depressed individuals using the free viewing paradigm and take the fixation time as the indicator:Firstly,study 1 aimed at whether depressed individuals have the attention bias that they are appealed to depression-related negative stimulus,and,on this basis,joined self/others variable to investigate whether the owner of the face is able to affect the attention bias to the emotional face of the depressed individuals.Secondly,study 2 aimed at whether the attention bias to self-related information of depressed individuals was stronger than that of healthy individuals.And,on this basis,emotion variable are joined in it to investigate the attention bias when depressed individuals watching self face and others' face at the same time,in other words,weather the attention bias to self face of depressed individuals is affected by the emotional type.Thirdly,study 3 is based on study 1 and study 2,stripped away the self-relating and the depression-relating to investigate which bias is more advantageous.The results showed,for depressive individuals,that depression-related information was more biased than non-depressive information,and this attention biasis also greater than that of healthy individuals,while healthy individuals tend to focus more on positive stimuli than on negative and neutral stimuli,which is also greater than that of depressed individuals.What were said above are established under the conditions of the face owner for self and others.Furthermore,whether the information is related to depression or not,individuals with depression both tend to pay more attention to self information than to non-self information,and more than healthy individuals.In addition,when take the neutral face as the standard,depressed individuals tend to pay more attention to information of self than to information of depression.