A smile or a frown can reveal more than emotion. The faces that capture a child’s attention may offer important clues about mental health and how depression develops.

A new study from Binghamton University, State University of New York, suggests that depression may affect how strongly children focus on emotional expressions, including happy, sad and angry faces. The pattern appears to vary depending on whether a child has a family history of depression.

Researchers at Binghamton University’s Mood Disorders Research Institute are studying how depression develops in children and adolescents. They are focusing on how family history and emotional experiences may influence vulnerability over time. By identifying these patterns during childhood, scientists hope to better understand who may be at greater risk and improve prevention strategies.

“Most of the vulnerabilities we’re focusing on are still ongoing during this period,” said Brandon Gibb, director of the Mood Disorders Research Institute and distinguished professor of psychology at the State University of New York. “You can capture things as they are being developed, rather than studying them after they have already been developed and are fairly stable.”

Tracking children’s attention to emotional faces

Previous research has linked depression with increased attention to sad faces. However, these associations are generally modest, and scientists remain uncertain whether biased attention contributes to depression or results from it.

The Binghamton study examined that question by tracking depressive symptoms and attention patterns over time. Researchers say it is the first study to investigate how changes in each factor predict changes in the other among children.

“The real novelty is that we focused on these transactional relationships,” said Kelly Gale, a doctoral student at Binghamton University and lead author of the paper. “We observed how attentional biases and depressive symptoms predicted each other across time. This is particularly novel and has never been done before.”

The research team, which also included Leslie A. Brick of the University of New Mexico, followed 242 children and their mothers for two years. Participants were assessed every six months.

During each visit, children viewed pairs of faces on a screen. One face showed a neutral expression, while the other showed a happy, sad or angry expression. Eye-tracking technology measured which faces attracted the children’s attention and how long they looked at them.

Children in the study watched faces conveying different emotions on a screen, while eye-tracking technology recorded where their attention was directed. Photo credit: NimStim facial expression set (Tottenham et al., 2009).

Family history of depression changes attention patterns

The findings suggest that children’s attention does not respond to increases in depressive symptoms in the same way. Family history appears to play an important role.

Among children whose mothers had a history of major depressive disorder, increased depressive symptoms were associated with greater attention to sad faces. As these children experienced more symptoms themselves, their attention became increasingly directed toward expressions of sadness.

“The more children who are already at risk experience depression themselves, the less able they are to distract themselves from sad events around them,” Gibb said.

“We know that when we’re depressed, what we focus on changes,” Gale said. “Our findings suggest that these changes may be more long-term and may vary depending on family history. One idea is that children of depressed mothers display more sad facial expressions from interactions with their mothers, so when they experience depression themselves, these types of facial expressions become even more salient, so children’s attention becomes increasingly fixated on sad facial expressions.”

Depression may reduce attention to happy faces

A different pattern emerged among children whose mothers had no history of depression.

In these children, increased depressive symptoms were not associated with greater attention to sad facial expressions. Instead, the children paid less attention to happy faces.

“What’s happening in low-risk children is that the experience of depression erodes the protective factor of how much attention they pay to happy faces,” Gibb said.

This difference suggests that depression may affect attention to emotional expressions through different pathways, depending on a child’s underlying family risk. For some children, it may become increasingly difficult to shift attention away from sadness. For others, positive emotional signals may become less likely to attract attention.

Researchers will continue tracking children into adolescence

The researchers are continuing to track the children as they enter adolescence, a period when the risk of depression increases for many young people. They hope to determine whether these early attention patterns are associated with a greater likelihood of receiving a depression diagnosis later in life.

The findings were reported in the paper “The Transactional Relationship Between Attentional Bias Toward Emotional Stimuli and Depressive Symptoms in Offspring of Mothers With and Without Major Depressive Disorder,” published in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Sciences.