Binghamton University researchers published findings in 2026 from a longitudinal study showing that attentional biases in children change with depressive symptoms and are influenced by a mother's depression history. The study examined transactional relations between attentional biases and depressive symptoms in children over time.

The researchers assessed 242 children and their mothers every six months for two years. During study visits, children viewed pairs of facial expressions on a screen, pairing a neutral face with an emotional face showing happiness, sadness, or anger. Eye-tracking technology recorded the duration and direction of the children's attention toward these facial expressions.

Children whose mothers had a history of major depressive disorder showed increased attention to sad faces as their own depressive symptoms increased. Conversely, children whose mothers had no history of depression showed decreased attention to happy faces as their own depressive symptoms increased. Previous research has linked depression to increased attention toward sad faces, but those effects were small and causal relationships remained unclear.

"We know that when you're depressed, it changes what you pay attention to. Our results suggest that these changes may be more long-lasting and may differ depending on family history," said Kelly Gair, a doctoral student.

"Most of the vulnerabilities that we focus on are still developing during this time period. You can catch things as they're developing, rather than only studying them once they're already there and pretty stable," said Brandon Gibb, director of the Mood Disorders Institute. "The real novel piece is that we looked at these transactional relations. Between attentional biases and depressive symptoms, we looked at the way that they were mutually predicting one another across the time points, which is especially novel and hasn't been done before," Gair said.

"For those who are already at risk, the more these children experience depression themselves, the more they lose their ability to pull their attention away from the sad things around them," Gibb said. "In our lower-risk children, what seems to be happening is that experiences of depression are eroding a protective factor, which is how much they pay attention to happy faces," he said. The research team included Leslie A. Brick from the University of New Mexico and plans to continue monitoring the children as they enter adolescence to assess potential links between attentional biases and clinical depression diagnoses. The research findings were published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.