Marchetti I, et al. – The current study was expected to explore whether attentional and memory biases are uniquely related to depression or whether they show substantial overlap. The present data indicated that across different paradigms and psychological measures, memory bias (and not attentional bias) represents a primary mechanism in depression.

Methods

• For the purpose of this study, the researchers examined the degree of specificity and overlap of attentional and memory biases for depressotypic stimuli in relation to depression and anxiety by means of meta-analytic commonality analysis.
• By including 4 published studies, they considered a pool of four hundred sixty-three healthy and subclinically depressed people, different experimental paradigms, and different psychological measures.

Results

• Results of this study suggested that memory bias is reliably and strongly related to depression and, particularly, to symptoms of negative mood, worthlessness, feelings of failure, and pessimism.
• Findings revealed that memory bias for negative information was minimally related to anxiety.
• According to the findings obtained, neither attentional bias nor the overlap between attentional and memory biases were significantly associated with depression.