When a child with a family history of depression starts to feel down, their gaze may linger on sad faces longer—a pattern that could become a self-reinforcing cycle, according to new research from Binghamton University.
Psychologists at the Mood Disorders Institute tracked 242 children and their mothers once every six months over two years, using eye-tracking technology to measure where their attention went when shown faces with different expressions. The study, published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, is the first to examine how attentional patterns and depressive symptoms predict changes in each other over time—a bidirectional relationship the researchers call transactional.
"The real novel piece is that we looked at these transactional relations," said Kelly Gair, a Ph.D. student at Binghamton and lead author of the paper. "Between attentional biases and depressive symptoms, we looked at the way that they were mutually predicting one another across the time points, which is especially novel and hasn't been done before."
The findings reveal two distinct pathways depending on family history. Among children whose mothers had experienced major depression, increases in their own depressive symptoms made their attention increasingly stuck on sad faces. "For those who are already at risk, the more these children experience depression themselves, the more they lose their ability to pull their attention away from the sad things around them," said Brandon Gibb, director of the Mood Disorders Institute and SUNY distinguished professor of psychology. Gair offered one explanation: children of mothers with depression are exposed to more facial displays of sadness, making those expressions feel more familiar and harder to look away from.
Children without a family history followed a different pattern. When they experienced depressive symptoms, their attention drifted away from happy faces rather than toward sad ones. "In our lower-risk children, what seems to be happening is that experiences of depression are eroding a protective factor, which is how much they pay attention to happy faces," Gibb said.
The researchers hope these insights will eventually help identify at-risk children earlier—before depression takes hold. "Most of the vulnerabilities that we focus on are still developing during this time period," Gibb noted. "You can catch things as they're developing, rather than only studying them once they're already there and pretty stable."