ArticleJournal of affective disorders2018
Free viewing of sad and happy faces in depression: A potential target for attention bias modification.
Article in Journal of affective disorders, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 104 citations in OpenAlex.
- I have my eye on the emotion: a review of eye-tracking studies exploring processing of emotional facial expressions.Psychological research · 2026Pooled it
- Emotional stimulation processing characteristics in depression: Meta-analysis of eye tracking findings.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Attention to threat in posttraumatic stress disorder as indexed by eye-tracking indices: a systematic review.Psychological medicine · 2019Pooled it
- Depression, family interaction and family intervention in adolescents at clinical-high risk for psychosis.Early intervention in psychiatry · 2021Trial
- A randomized controlled trial of gaze-contingent music reward therapy for major depressive disorder.Depression and anxiety · 2021Trial
- Video-Oculographic Saccadic Fatigability Distinguishes Myasthenia Gravis From Unilateral Ocular Motor Cranial Nerve Palsy in Diplopia: A Prospective Diagnostic Study.European journal of neurology · 2026Article
- From attentional blink to emotional dysregulation: a study on the cognitive and emotional interactions in depression.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Adaptive Attentional Regulation to Emotional Faces in Subclinical Depression.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Relationship Between Emotion Processing Assessed by an Affect Rating Task and Depression Symptoms Following the Accelerated Sequential Dorsolateral-Dorsomedial Prefrontal rTMS Treatment.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Initial and Sustained Attentional Bias Toward Emotional Faces in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder.Journal of eye movement research · 2025Article
- The Positive Effect of Negative Stimuli: Exposure to Negative Emotional Stimuli Improves Mood in Individuals with Major Depressive Disorder.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- AI-assisted multi-modal information for the screening of depression: a systematic review and meta-analysis.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- The association between family function and adolescents' non-suicidal self-injury behaviors-is Chinese culture involved?Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Attention Allocation for Dysphoric Information in Adults with Depression Symptoms Using Eye-tracking and Mouse-tracking.PloS one · 2025Article
- Disgust-induced attentional blink at Lag3: a diagnostic and therapeutic approach to depression.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- A look at the free-viewing paradigm in eye-tracking research to assess positive attentional bias.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Eye-tracking measurement of attention bias to social threat among youth: A replication and extension study.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2024Article
- The Ambiguous Cue Task: Measurement reliability of an experimental paradigm for the assessment of interpretation bias and associations with mental health.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- An influence of menopausal symptoms on mental health, emotion perception, and quality of life: a multi-faceted approach.Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation · 2024Article
- Eye-tracking evidence of a relationship between attentional bias for emotional faces and depression severity in patients with treatment-resistant depression.Scientific reports · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundIdentification of reliable targets for therapeutic interventions is essential for developing evidence-based therapies. Attention biases toward negative-valenced information and lack of protective positive bias toward positive-valenced stimuli have been implicated in depression. However, extant research has typically used tasks with narrow stimuli arrays and unknown or poor psychometric properties. Here, we recorded eye-tracking data of depressed and non-depressed participants during a free viewing task to address these limitations.
methodsPatients with major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 20) and undergraduate students with high (n = 23) and low (n = 20) levels of depression freely viewed 60 different face-based matrices for six seconds each. Each matrix included eight sad and eight happy facial expressions. Gaze patterns on sad and happy areas of interest (AOIs) were explored. Internal consistency for the entire sample and one-week test-retest reliability in the student sub-sample were assessed.
resultsCompared to undergraduates with low levels of depression, patients with MDD and students with high levels of depression dwelled significantly longer on sad faces. Results also showed a significantly longer dwell time on the happy AOI relative to the sad AOI only in the low depression group. The two depressed groups dwelled equally on the two AOIs. The task demonstrated high internal consistency and acceptable one-week test-retest reliability. LIMITATIONS: Only sad and happy facial expressions were used. Relative small sample size.
conclusionRelative to non-depressed participants, depressed participants showed prolonged dwelling on sad faces and lack of bias toward happy faces. These biases present viable targets for gaze-contingent attention bias modification therapy.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.