Attentional biases for emotional facial stimuli in currently depressed patients with bipolar disorder1

Compared to the extensive research focussing on cognitive vulnerability factors underlying the onset and maintenance of major depressive disorder, studies investigating dysfunctional processing of emotional information in bipolar depression remain scarce. Therefore, this experimental study examined the nature and time course of attentional biases for emotional information in depressive patients with bipolar disorder. Fourteen currently depressed patients with Bipolar I Disorder (BD) and 14 nondepressed control participants (NC), matched for age, gender and education level, performed an emotional modification of the spatial cueing task. Cues consisted of angry, positive and neutral facial expressions presented for 200 and 1,000 ms. BD patients showed an enhanced cue validity effect for angry faces and had more difficulties in disengaging attention away from angry as well as happy facial expressions compared to NC participants, who conversely demonstrated a «protective bias» away from negative information. This pattern of differential attentional processing was only found within the early stage of information processing at a presentation duration of 200 ms. These results provide evidence for deficits at the early stages of attentive processing of emotional information in depressed bipolar patients compared to healthy controls.