ArticleJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2023
Attentional biases for sad faces in offspring of mothers with a history of major depression: trajectories of change from childhood to adolescence.
Article in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 7 citations in OpenAlex.
- Transactional relations between attentional biases for affective stimuli and depressive symptoms in offspring of mothers with and without major depressive disorder.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2026Article
- Electrocortical Reactivity to Emotional Faces in Youth of Depressed Mothers: The Moderating Role of Emotion Regulation Styles.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- Attenuated cognitive control network connectivity as a mechanism in mother-daughter intergenerational transmission of depression: a preliminary study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Young Children of Mothers with a History of Depression Show Attention Bias to Sad Faces: An Eye-tracking Study.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2024Article
- Maternal Trauma and Psychopathology Symptoms Affect Refugee Children's Mental Health But Not Their Emotion Processing.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2024Article
- AttentionCARE: replicability of a BCI for the clinical application of augmented reality-guided EEG-based attention modification for adolescents at high risk for depression.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundTheorists have proposed that the way children process social-emotional information may serve as a mechanism of risk for the intergenerational transmission of depression. There is growing evidence that infants and children of mothers with a history of major depressive disorder (MDD) during the child's life exhibit attentional avoidance of sad faces, which has been proposed as an early emerging emotion regulation strategy. In contrast, there is clear evidence that at-risk and depressed adolescents and adults exhibit difficulty disengaging attention from sad faces.
methodsSeeking to link these two literatures, the current U.S.-based study used eye tracking within the context of an accelerated longitudinal design to assess attentional biases in 8-14-year-old offspring of mothers with a history MDD during the child's life (n = 123) or no history of MDD (n = 119) every six months for two years, allowing us to map trajectories of attention from age 8 to 16.
resultsMother MDD history moderated age-based changes in children's gaze duration to sad (t[240] = 2.44, p = .02), but not happy (t[240] = 0.11, p = .91) or angry (t[240] = 0.67, p = .50), faces. Consistent our hypotheses, offspring of mothers with MDD exhibited significantly less attention to sad faces than offspring of never depressed mothers before age 8.5 but significantly more attention to sad faces after age 14.5, which was due to an increase in gaze duration to sad faces from childhood to adolescence among offspring of mothers with MDD (t[122] = 5.44, p < .001) but not among offspring of never depressed mothers (t[118] = 1.49, p = .14).
conclusionsIt appears that the form, and perhaps function, of attentional bias may shift across development in at-risk youth. To the extent that this is true, it has significant implications not only for theories of the intergenerational transmission of depression risk but also for prevention and early intervention efforts designed to reduce this risk.
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