Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a highly prevalent illness that affects 12.2% of Canadians over the course of their lifetimes. MDD incurs broad costs to society through lost days at work and productivity and increased chances of early mortality or the development of other medical illnesses. MDD ranks fourth highest on global burden of disease and is projected to rank second by 2020. Identifying and understanding the factors that put people at risk for MDD and that contribute to its maintenance is crucial as it may lead to the development of prevention techniques and the enhancement of treatments. The proposed project will investigate a known risk factor for depression - biased attention for negative information. Research has shown that people with MDD focus their attention more on negative words or faces in their environments compared to non-depressed individuals. However, it remains unclear as to how intense a stimulus needs to be to elicit an attention bias. The proposed project will expose participants to faces showing sad, happy and angry emotions varying in their emotional intensity. The amount of attentional bias - the amount of attention they pay to sad faces versus other faces - will be recorded. I anticipate that depressed individuals will show an attentional bias for not only sad faces of high emotional intensity, but also for much more subtle, ambiguous sad expressions. Furthermore, I predict that this bias will be positively associated with depression severity and chronicity. My results will expand our understanding of the development and maintenance of MDD. Specifically, if depressed individuals' attention is drawn to subtle stimuli that are much more common in day-to-day life, then they encounter far more opportunities to experience negative deflections in mood. This research will elaborate on a characteristic that could be used to identify high-risk cases, or that could inform novel treatment approaches focused on correcting attentional biases.