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Most patients with major depression will experience recurrent episodes of illness. Beck’s theory of cognitive vulnerability to depression posits that such patients are biased toward perception of, attention to, and memory of negative environmental stimuli. These researchers examined attention bias among 26 individuals with current major depression, 23 with remitted depression, and 19 never-depressed controls. Participants lacked other psychiatric comorbidities.
To determine whether participants focused on neutral, happy, or sad faces, investigators measured how long it took for them to identify a small dot appearing in one of two photographs presented together. The control group showed attention bias toward happy faces and away from sad face…