Changes in the way children pay attention to facial expressions—and which expressions they choose to pay most attention to—may offer an early warning sign of depression risk, according to new research from New York's Binghamton University. Experts said the findings could help identify vulnerable children before more serious symptoms emerge. "The study illustrates how depression may affect how children pay attention to emotional information in their environment," Ciara Bogdanovic, a psychotherapist, licensed marriage and family therapist and founder of Sagebrush Psychotherapy, told Newsweek.
"We often think of cognitive biases as precursors to depression, but this research suggests a different direction than expected." Bogdanovic, while reviewing the findings, said children experiencing depressive symptoms may become less likely to notice happy facial expressions and more likely to focus on sad ones instead. "In particular, children whose mothers had a history of major depressive disorder (MDD) showed increased attention to sad faces as their depressive symptoms increased, while children without a maternal history of MDD showed decreased attention to happy faces," she said. "These shifts in attention may deepen depressive symptoms and weaken protective factors." The study, conducted by researchers at the Mood Disorders Institute at Binghamton University, examined how depression develops in children and adolescents and whether changes in attention to emotional cues are linked to depressive symptoms.
Previous research has suggested that people with depression tend to pay greater attention to sad faces. However, those associations have generally been modest, and scientists have long debated whether these attention patterns contribute to depression or appear as a result of it. To investigate the question, researchers followed 242 children and their mothers over a two-year period, assessing participants once every six months.
During each visit, children viewed pairs of faces displayed on a screen. One face showed a neutral expression, while the other showed an emotional expression, including happy, sad or angry faces. Researchers used eye-tracking technology to measure which faces captured the children's attention and how long they continued looking at them.
The findings suggest depressive symptoms do not influence every child in the same way, or as previously thought. Among children whose mothers had a history of major depressive disorder, rising depressive symptoms were linked to increased attention toward sad facial expressions. As symptoms worsened, these children became increasingly drawn to signs of sadness in others.
In contrast, children whose mothers had no history of depression showed a different pattern. Rather than becoming more focused on sad faces, they simply paid less attention to happy expressions as depressive symptoms increased. The results suggest family history may shape how depression affects the way children process emotional information.
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