Depression reduces perceptual sensitivity for positive words and pictures.
There is evidence of maladaptive attentional biases for lexical information (e.g., Atchley, Ilardi, & Enloe, 2003; Atchley, Stringer, Mathias, Ilardi, & Minatrea, 2007) and for pictographic stimuli (e.g., Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004) among patients with depression. The current research looks for depressotypic processing biases among depressed out-patients and non-clinical controls, using both verbal and pictorial stimuli. A d' measure (sensitivity index) was used to examine each participant's perceptual sensitivity threshold. Never-depressed controls evidenced a detection bias for positive picture stimuli, while depressed participants had no such bias. With verbal stimuli, depressed individuals showed specific decrements in the detection of positive person-referent words (WINNER), but not with positive non-person-referent words (SUNSHINE) or with negative words. Never-depressed participants showed no such differences across word types. In the current study, depression is characterised both by an absence of the normal positivistic biases seen in individuals without mood disorders (consistent with McCabe & Gotlib, 1995), and by a specific reduction in sensitivity for person-referent positive information that might be inconsistent with depressotypic self-schemas.
Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. ratchley@ku.edu
Ruth Ann
RA
Atchley
Stephen S
SS
Ilardi
Keith M
KM
Young
Natalie N
NN
Stroupe
Aminda J
AJ
O'Hare
Steven L
SL
Bistricky
Elizabeth
E
Collison
Linzi
L
Gibson
Jonathan
J
Schuster
Rebecca J
RJ
Lepping
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods / Q000523:psychology; D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003865:Major Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D012660:Semantics; D014796:Visual Perception