Attention Bias in Emotional Conflict in Major Depression Disorder: An Eye Tracking Study

Abstract

Major depression disorder (MDD) has been proved to have difficulty in emotional conflict processing. The objective of this study is to investigate the different attention deployment patterns in emotional conflict processing between MDDs and Healthy Controls (HCs) using eye tracking data. A face-word Stroop task was used, and 49 MDDs and 50 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited in the experiment. Finally, our results indicated that MDDs demonstrated lower accuracy (ACC) compared with HCs during the process of emotional conflict. Moreover, we found attention bias in the process of attention maintenance but not vigilance, and it may be one of the possible reasons for different ability of emotional conflict processing between MDDs and HCs.