The Role of Interference and Inhibition Processes in Dysphoric Early Adolescents

Cognitive theories emphasize the importance of attentional biases in the development and maintenance of depression. Noteworthy, recent studies indicate that depression-related biases only occur in later stages of attentional processing. This is consistent with the idea that attention is a multicomponent process, consisting of at least two mechanisms: selection and inhibition. Therefore, this study aims to investigate interference and inhibition toward angry and happy stimuli in dysphoric adolescents compared to nondysphoric adolescents. To examine interference and inhibition of emotional information in 21 dysphoric (17 girls) and 28 nondysphoric adolescents (17 girls), 10-16 years of age, a Negative Affective Priming task was used. In this task, a target has to be evaluated as positive or negative while ignoring a distractor. As expected, dysphoric adolescents showed both higher interference from and higher inhibition of angry stimuli relative to nondysphoric adolescents. In contrast, happy stimuli did not lead to interference and consequently did not have to be inhibited in either group. Finally, a positive relation was found between interference and the subsequent inhibition of emotional stimuli. These observations confirm the existence of a bias toward angry faces in dysphoric adolescents and indicate a higher inhibition of angry faces in dysphoric adolescents compared to nondysphoric adolescents. The obtained results are different from those of similar previous studies in depressed or dysphoric adults using sad faces or negatively valenced words and might reveal important emotion-specific or age-specific inhibitory biases.