Attentional biases for emotional facial stimuli in currently depressed patients with bipolar disorder

Compared to the extensive research focussing on cognitive vulnerability factors underlying the onset and maintenance of major depressive disorder, studies investigating dysfunctional processing of emotional information in bipolar depression remain scarce. Therefore, this experimental study examined the nature and time course of attentional biases for emotional information in depressive patients with bipolar disorder. Fourteen currently depressed patients with Bipolar I Disorder (BD) and 14 nondepressed control participants (NC), matched for age, gender and education level, performed an emotional modification of the spatial cueing task. Cues consisted of angry, positive and neutral facial expressions presented for 200 and 1,000 ins. BD patients showed an enhanced cue validity effect for angry faces and had more difficulties in disengaging attention away from angry as well as happy facial expressions compared to NC participants, who conversely demonstrated a "protective bias" away from negative information. This pattern of differential attentional processing was only found within the early stage of information processing at a presentation duration of 200 ins. These results provide evidence for deficits at the early stages of attentive processing of emotional information in depressed bipolar patients compared to healthy controls

How are OCD Patients and Family Members Dealing with the Waxing and Waning Pattern of the COVID-19 Pandemic? Results of a Longitudinal Observational Study

The current study aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of people with OCD and the degree of family accommodation (FA) by live-in family members across phases of the lockdown measures imposed by the Belgian government. Forty-nine OCD patients and 26 live-in family members participated in the study. We assessed OCD symptom severity and FA of the live-in family members, as well as depressive symptoms, anxiety and stress levels and COVID-19 related psychological distress of patients and family members at four different timepoints: one month after the start of the lockdown (T(1)), during the gradual relaxation (T(2)), between the two waves (T(3)) and during the second wave (T(4)). Results showed that although COVID-19 related stress increased and decreased in accordance with the waxing and waning pattern of the pandemic, OCD symptoms showed an initial slight increase followed by a decrease at T(3) and again at T(4). Changes in family members’ accommodation of symptoms followed the same course as the OCD symptoms. Furthermore, OCD symptoms correlated with depressive symptoms, anxiety and stress levels and COVID-19 related distress at all timepoints. It is important to involve family members in the treatment of OCD even during a pandemic. Clinicians should also pay attention to symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress during OCD treatment. Further research is necessary to entangle the causal relationship between OCD symptoms, FA and symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress

Attention for emotional facial expressions in dysphoria: an eye-movement registration study

Former research demonstrated that depression is associated with dysfunctional attentional processing of emotional information. Most studies examined this bias by registration of response latencies. The present study employed an ecologically valid measurement of attentive processing, using eye-movement registration. Dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants viewed slides presenting sad, angry, happy and neutral facial expressions. For each type of expression, three components of visual attention were analysed: the relative fixation frequency, fixation time and glance duration. Attentional biases were also investigated for inverted facial expressions to ensure that they were not related to eye-catching facial features. Results indicated that non-dysphoric individuals were characterised by longer fixating and dwelling on happy faces. Dysphoric individuals demonstrated a longer dwelling on sad and neutral faces. These results were not found for inverted facial expressions. The present findings are in line with the assumption that depression is associated with a prolonged attentional elaboration on negative information