Are attentional bias and memory bias for negative words causally related?

In cognitive theories of depression, processing biases are assumed to be partly responsible for the onset and maintenance of mood disorders. Despite a wealth of studies examining the relation between depression and individual biases (at the level of attention, interpretation, and memory), little is known about relationships between different biases. The purpose of the present study was to assess if attentional bias is causally related to memory bias.

71 participants were randomly assigned to a control (n = 37) or attentional training group (n = 34). The attentional manipulation was followed by an explicit, intentional memory task during which novel neutral, negative, and positive words were presented.

It was found that individuals with elevated depression score trained to orient away from negative words did not display a memory bias for negative words (adjectives) whereas similar individuals displayed this memory bias in the control condition.

Generalization of the findings is limited because of the short study time frame and specific nature of the memory task.

These results indicate that altering attentional bias can influence elaborative processing of emotional material and that this bias could be one of the causes of mood congruent memory in depression.