Alleviated negative rather than positive attentional bias in patients with depression in remission: an eye-tracking study

OBJECTIVE: To investigate attentional bias toward happy and sad faces in remitted depressed (RD) patients compared with healthy control (HC) subjects. METHODS: This cross-sectional study enrolled RD patients and sex- and age-matched HC subjects. Eye movement data were acquired for all study participants while free viewing a 2 × 2 matrix of emotional faces. The attentional bias toward different emotional faces and whether the attention maintenance components generated attentional bias in the RD patients were analysed by comparing the attentional modes of the RD group with the HC group. RESULTS: A total of 27 RD patients and 27 HC subjects were analysed in this study. The RD and HC groups exhibited no significant differences toward first fixation location and initial attentional maintenance. In later attentional maintenance, the RD group showed significantly less attentional bias toward happy faces, but there were no significant differences in their attentional bias toward sad faces, compared with the HC group. CONCLUSIONS: This present study showed that the negative attentional bias of RD patients was successfully eased, but their positive attentional bias was still insufficient.