Citation

McCabe SB, Gotlib IH. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 1995; 104(1): 241-245.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1995, American Psychological Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

7897048

Abstract

Clinically depressed and nondepressed individuals completed a deployment-of-attention task developed by I. H. Gotlib, A. L. McLachlan, and A. N. Katz (1988). Results indicated that the clinically depressed individuals perform the task in an unbiased fashion, attending equally to positive-, negative-, and neutral-content stimuli. In contrast, the nondepressed individuals demonstrated a "protective" bias against the perception of negative stimuli by avoiding such material in favor of positive or neutral stimuli. Overall, the results of this study suggest that clinically depressed individuals do not show an attentional bias toward negative information, but rather, fail to demonstrate the positive or protective bias that is evident in nondepressed individuals.

Language: en