2. Introduction
• Potentially as a basic mood regulation strategy, an infant will tend to
look less at his mother’s face if she is depressed (Boyd, Zayas, &
McKee, 2006). Without a stable parental scaffold to construct robust
emotion regulation, a child’s inhibitory capacity might not fully
develop.
• Interestingly, research on serotonin transporter gene variants (5-
HTTLPR) linked to increased depression risk indicate that
environmental factors during development may help calibrate a
pattern of increased neural responsiveness to negative facial affect.
• Major depression is also often characterized by amygdala
dysregulation (Mayberg, 1997). In particular, depression has been
strongly linked to greater amygdala reactivity to sad faces and lower
reactivity to happy faces (Dannlowski et al., 2007a; Surguladze et al.,
2005; Suslow et al., 2010).
3. Face-in-the-crowd task
• The face-in-the-crowd task assesses how efficiently one detects
specific facial emotions within slides that include between two and six
schematic faces. Schematic faces are rudimentary line drawings
conveying happy, sad, or neutral affect. Schematic faces stand in for
human faces in this task because facial emotion detection presumably
occurs rapidly and efficiently based on low-level perceptual features
(Purcell & Stewart, 1988). Some slides show faces with identical affect,
and other slides include one emotional expression that contrasts with
surrounding expressions (e.g., one happy among three neutrals). In
response to slides, participants are to rapidly decide if all expressions
are identical or if one is different.
4. Hypothesises
• People with higher levels of depression
will respond more quickly to a
discrepant sad face in a neutral crowd
• High depression individuals will have
their attention held for longer time with
a crowd of all sad faces as compared to
neutral/happy.
5. a very similar study
• Karparova, Kersting, and Suslow (2005) investigated whether a
depressed group would exhibit delayed disengagement of attention
from negative faces compared to a nondepressed group. All
participants completed the face-in-the- crowd task twice,
corresponding with the depressed individuals’ pre- and post-
treatment time points. However, at both time points there were no
between-group differences in the ability to disengage attention from
distracting backgrounds of negative faces. It is worth noting that the
schematic faces in Karparova et al. differed only by the ends of the
mouth line, a coarse, low-level feature. Thus, it is possible that more
complex spatial features making up true emotional faces could elicit
stronger sustained attention and provide more of a challenge for
disengagement processing.
