New research provides evidence that the way youth pay attention to emotional faces changes after they experience depressive symptoms, and these changes depend on whether their mothers have a history of depression. Specifically, children of depressed mothers tend to look more at sad faces as their own symptoms increase, whereas children of mothers without a history of depression tend to look less at happy faces. These findings were published in Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.
Cognitive models of depression propose that people who are depressed or at risk for the condition process information differently than others. One aspect of this is attentional bias, which refers to a systematic tendency to focus on certain types of emotional information. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 demonstrated that adults with depression spend more time looking at negative facial expressions during visual tasks. In theory, lingering on negative emotional cues like sad faces might contribute to the development or maintenance of a depressed mood by causing people to view their surroundings in a more negative light.
“Depression often begins during adolescence, and children of mothers who have experienced clinically significant depression (major depressive disorder) are at greater risk of developing depression themselves,” said Kelly Gair, a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY).
“Researchers have often focused on whether paying more attention to negative emotional information, like sad facial expressions, might be one reason some children go on to develop depression themselves,” Gair explained. “However, there has remained a gap in this existing research as most studies have only examined the relations between these factors at a single point in time, making it difficult to determine whether changes in attention to emotional information come before depression or emerge as depressive symptoms develop.”
“We wanted to better understand how attention to emotional information and depressive symptoms influence one another over time, especially among children at higher risk for depression,” she added.
A key factor in understanding how these patterns unfold in youth is family history. Children whose mothers have experienced major depressive disorder are known to be at a higher risk of developing depression themselves. In a 2026 study of children, passively discussing problems without seeking solutions predicted an increased risk for depression, but this was only observed among the offspring of mothers with a history of the disorder. Such findings indicate that youth with a maternal history of depression might process their social and emotional worlds differently than their peers.
To explore how attention and depression influence each other over time, Gair and her colleagues—working under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Brandon Gibb at the university’s mood disorders laboratory—followed 242 mother-child dyads over a two-year period. The children were between the ages of 8 and 14 at the beginning of the study. Out of the participating mothers, 123 had a history of major depressive disorder during their child’s lifetime, and 119 had no lifetime history of any mood disorder.
“One thing that makes this study unique is that it followed the same group of children over two years and used eye-tracking technology to objectively measure where they were looking,” Gair noted. “That allowed us to ask questions about how attention and depressive symptoms change together over time, rather than relying on a single timepoint.”
“Importantly, this study would not have been possible without the dedication of the children and their mothers who returned to our lab every six months for two years,” Gair added. “Their willingness to share their time and experiences is what makes research like this possible!”
The families completed assessments every six months, totaling five visits. At each visit, the children completed a self-report questionnaire measuring their depressive symptoms. They also participated in a visual assessment called a dot-probe task while an infrared eye tracker recorded their gaze.
During this task, the children viewed pairs of faces on a screen. Each pair featured one emotional face paired with a neutral face, with the emotional faces displaying sad, happy, or angry expressions. The visual assessments included 192 trials where children were asked to indicate the number of asterisks that appeared on the screen after a face pair disappeared. By tracking where and how long the children looked at the screen before the asterisks appeared, the researchers could measure their sustained attention to different emotional expressions.
Gair and her colleagues discovered that depressive symptoms predicted future changes in how children looked at emotional faces, but the specific changes depended on the mothers’ mental health history. “Two things surprised us,” Gair told PsyPost. “First, we expected that the relation between attention to emotional faces and depressive symptoms would be bidirectional over time. Second, experiences of depression appeared to affect children with and without a family history of depression differently.”
“For children of mothers with depression, increases in depression were associated with greater attention to sad faces over time, which is thought to serve as a risk factor for later depression,” she explained. “For children of mothers with no depression history, increases in depression were associated with less attention to happy faces over time, which would typically be a protective factor.”
“This shows that early experiences with depression may affect children differently based on their family history of the disease,” Gair noted.
In both groups, the researchers did not find evidence for the reverse sequence, meaning attentional biases did not predict future increases or decreases in the children’s depressive symptoms.
“One of the biggest takeaways from our study’s findings is, among children, biases in attention to emotional information appears to be a consequence of, rather than a risk factor for, depression,” Gair said. “In other words, as some children start feeling more depressed, they may also begin paying more attention to sad information, or less attention to happy information, around them.”
“I think the biggest misconception would be assuming that paying more attention to sad information causes depression,” she added. “Our findings suggest the relationship may actually be the other way around, such that as depressive symptoms increase, changes in attention may follow. This is an important distinction because it changes how we think about when attentional biases emerge and how they might fit into the development of depression.”
“This suggests that these attention patterns are still very malleable in children, which is different from what we see in adults where attention biases predict future risk for depression,” Gair said. “These findings highlight the importance of recognizing depressive symptoms early, before these patterns of attention become more established.”
The researchers also measured attention to angry faces, but the results were not statistically significant in either direction. The findings are in tension with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that higher physical avoidance of angry faces predicted a greater likelihood of developing depressive symptoms two years later in adolescent girls. The newer study, however, measured visual attentional biases to sad and happy faces in a mixed-gender youth sample, rather than focusing on the behavioral motor avoidance of angry faces.
“Depression is incredibly complex, so it is rare for any one factor to have a large effect on its own,” Gair pointed out. “What is unique about our study is that we looked at changes in attention biases and depression over time while also considering the role played by children’s family history of depression.”
“The study shows that early experiences with depression can impact how children pay attention to the world around them and that, importantly, this influence may differ for children of mothers with and without a history of major depression themselves,” she said. “Studies like ours help to show how various factors can combine to influence child development.”
The current study offers insights into how depression and attention interact, but there are a few limitations to consider. The research followed children between the ages of 8 and 14 for two years. Because attentional biases are thought to develop during childhood and solidify later, it is possible that these visual habits become stronger predictors of future depression as teenagers grow into adults. Future research could investigate whether these visual biases interact with stress to predict future depression in older age groups.
Maternal depression is just one aspect of family vulnerability. The study did not include information about fathers’ mental health histories or current family stressors, such as financial difficulties or community environment, which could also influence how children learn to process emotional information. The participants were predominantly non-Hispanic White and recruited from a single local community, meaning the results might not automatically apply to populations with different cultural backgrounds or lived experiences.
“The next step for this line of research would be to replicate these findings in another group of children and adolescents,” Gair said. “Beyond that, we are interested in understanding how other aspects of children’s daily lives, including social media use, may influence the way they pay attention to emotional information and how these processes relate to depression.”
The study, “Transactional Relations Between Attentional Biases for Affective Stimuli and Depressive Symptoms in Offspring of Mothers With and Without Major Depressive Disorder,” was authored by Kelly A. Gair, Leslie A. Brick, and Brandon E. Gibb.
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