Abstract
Heightened attention towards negative information is characteristic of depression. Evidence is emerging for a negative attentional bias in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), perhaps driven by the high comorbidity between ASD and depression. We investigated whether ASD is characterised by a negative attentional bias and whether this can be explained by comorbid (sub) clinical depression. Participants (n = 116) with current (CD) or remitted depression (RD) and/or ASD, and 64 controls viewed positively and negatively valenced (non-)social pictures. Groups were compared on three components of visual attention using linear mixed models. Both CD individuals with and without ASD, but not remitted depressed and never-depressed ASD individuals showed a negative bias, suggesting that negative attentional bias might be a depressive state-specific marker for depression in ASD.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by a triad of deficits involving communication, reciprocal social interactions, and restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests (American Psychiatric Association 2013)
The analysis further revealed a main effect of Valence, which indicated that participants looked longer at negative compared to positive stimuli, F (1, 13,102.08) = 9.70, p = 0.002, mean differences (Mdiff) = 190.64 ms, 95% CI [70.67, 310.61]
We examined whether ASD is characterised by a negative attentional bias and whether this can be explained by comorbid clinical and subclinical depression
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by a triad of deficits involving communication, reciprocal social interactions, and restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Biased attentional processing is the automatic tendency to focus more on negative information and is a hallmark feature of depression (Beck 1967; Beck and Bredemeier 2016; Bower 1981; LeMoult and Gotlib 2019; Williams et al 1988) This feature has generally been examined in depression using behavioural tasks such as the dot-probe task (e.g., Peckham et al 2010), the emotional Stroop task (e.g., Peckham et al 2010), the exogenous cuing paradigm (e.g., Koster et al 2005), or the visual search task (e.g., Rinck and Becker 2005). An eye-tracking task was employed in the current study
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