Children's Eye Movements Could Reveal Early Signs of Depression, Study Finds
A new study from Binghamton University shows that changes in how children pay attention to emotional faces may indicate early depression, with patterns differing based on family history of depression.
Researchers at Binghamton University’s Mood Disorders Institute have discovered that a child’s attention to emotional facial expressions can reveal early signs of depression. The study, published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, followed 242 children and their mothers for two years, with assessments every six months.
During each visit, children viewed images of faces: one neutral and one showing happiness, sadness, or anger. Eye-tracking technology recorded which face they focused on and for how long. The results showed that the relationship between depressive symptoms and attention patterns depended on the mother’s history of depression.
For children whose mothers had experienced major depressive disorder, higher depressive symptoms were associated with increased attention to sad faces. According to the researchers, this suggests that for at-risk children, depression may make it harder to disengage from sad stimuli. In contrast, for children whose mothers had no history of depression, depressive symptoms led to decreased attention to happy faces, which the researchers interpreted as a loss of a protective factor.
Lead author Kelly Gair, a PhD student, noted that depression changes what people pay attention to, and these changes may be long-lasting and influenced by family history. The team plans to continue following the children into adolescence to see if these attention patterns predict later clinical depression. This study is the first to examine the mutual influence between depressive symptoms and attention biases over time in children.
