Emotional Infant Face Processing in Women With Major Depression and Expecting Parents With Depressive Symptoms.

ABSTRACT: Processing of emotional facial expressions is of great importance in interpersonal relationships. Aberrant engagement with facial expressions, particularly an engagement with sad faces, loss of engagement with happy faces, and enhanced memory of sadness has been found in depression. Since most studies used adult faces, we here examined if such biases also occur in processing of infant faces in those with depression or depressive symptoms. In study 1, we recruited 25 inpatient women with major depression and 25 matched controls. In study 2, we extracted a sample of expecting parents from the NorBaby study, where 29 reported elevated levels of depressive symptoms, and 29 were matched controls. In both studies, we assessed attentional bias with a dot-probe task using happy, sad and neutral in

SUBMITTER: Bohne A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8283203 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature