Grant: Operating Grant

Major depression is a debilitating disorder, and it is associated with may concurrent other mental and physical health problems, including the risk of suicide. Unfortunately, depression is also often a recurring disorder, and the risk of recurrence increases with each subsequent episode. Recent research in the area of cognition has indicated that depressed persons often have attentional biases, in that they selectively attend to and remember negative information compared to nondepressed others. They also appear to have difficulty inhibiting negative biases, once they have been initiated. These attentional biases can now be studied with novel and sophisticated methods. The current program of research will examine the specificity of these cognitive biases, and their role in the prediction of onset and relapse for depression. The results will inform models of depression, and will have clear implications for prevention and treatment.