Abstract
ObjectivesMindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an evidence-based treatment to prevent relapse in individuals with recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD). It is not clear if MBCT is an effective therapy for current depression, and it is not clear what mechanisms are responsible for the effectiveness of MBCT. Theoretically, MBCT is believed to modify the processing of emotional information and reduce cognitive vulnerability to depression; however, it is not clear if MBCT leads to normalization of attentional biases in depressed individuals. The aim of the current study was to determine if MBCT can modify some of the attentional biases underlying depression in MDD.MethodsParticipants were 53 individuals with diagnosis of current MDD. They were randomly assigned to either MBCT (n = 25) or wait list control group (n = 28) condition. Before and after the 8-week MBCT intervention participants completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale (CESD), they viewed slides presenting sad, angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions, and their eye movements were recorded during the viewing task.ResultsAs expected, compared to participants in the control group, the CESD scores of participants who received MBCT decreased following treatment, their attention to sad faces decreased, and their attention to happy faces increased. Moreover, cross-lagged analysis suggested a causal link from changes in attentional bias to changes in depression.ConclusionsWe found that MBCT can modify the attentional processing of emotional facial stimuli and that attentional bias modification may translate into clinical improvement in currently depressed individuals.
Highlights
These findings suggest that change in depressive attentional bias may be linked to mechanisms that are the focus of Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)
Similar to Owens and Gibb (2017) and Krejtz et al (2018), we measured attentional bias by calculating gaze duration for specific facial expressions controlling for total gaze duration for all facial expressions
We evaluated the effectiveness of an 8-week MBCT training on modification of attentional biases to emotional faces in a sample of currently depressed individuals
Summary
We measured visual attention using gaze duration (i.e., how long, in total, a person dwelled on a face) separately for angry, happy, neutral, and sad faces. The analyses of relative gaze duration produced a significant interaction effect among training, testing session, and face type (F(3, 138) = 4.02, p = .009, ɳp2 = .08). At the pre-training session, there were no group differences in relative gaze duration on different faces (for angry: F(1, 46) = 2.14, p = .15, ɳp2 = .044, sad: F(1, 46) < 1, happy: F(1, 46) = 1.46, p = .23, ɳp2 = .031, neutral: F(1, 46) = 3.58, p = .07, ɳp2 = .072). Neither of the lags from CESD scores to gaze duration on sad faces and on happy faces was significant Such a pattern of results is consistent with a casual sequence in which changes in attentional focus lead to. There was no evidence for a causal sequence in which changes in depressive symptoms lead to changes in attentional focus
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