Transactional relations between attentional biases for affective stimuli and depressive symptoms in offspring of mothers with and without major depressive disorder.

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Abstract
Attentional biases toward depression-relevant stimuli (e.g., sad faces) are thought to contribute to the development and maintenance of depression, but research in youth is limited and primarily cross-sectional. Therefore, it remains unclear whether such biases are risk factors for, versus consequences of, depression (or both), and whether these links may be stronger among youth already at risk for depression due to a family history of the disorder. To address these questions, the present multiwave longitudinal study followed 242 mothers and their offspring (ages 8-14; 51.65% girls, 81.40% non-Hispanic White) over 2 years with assessments every 6 months (five assessments total) to examine prospective relations between attentional biases (measured via a dot-probe eye-tracking task) and depressive symptoms in youth. Of the mothers, 123 had a history of major depressive disorder (MDD) during their child's life and the rest had no lifetime history of MDD. Using random intercepts cross-lagged panel models, we found that depressive symptoms predicted prospective changes in attentional biases, but not the reverse, and the pattern of attentional bias change differed based on maternal history of MDD. Specifically, among offspring of mothers with MDD, higher depressive symptoms at a given assessment predicted future increases in attentional bias to sad faces, whereas among offspring of never depressed mothers, higher depressive symptoms predicted subsequent decreases in attentional bias to happy faces. These findings suggest that experiences of depression may contribute to different patterns of attention to emotional cues based on maternal history of MDD. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Funding Information
  • National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD057066)
  • National Institute of Mental Health (MH130397)

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