Emotional information processing in depressed elderly with suicidal behavior

Elderly suicide is a public health problem, especially in the presence of unipolar depression. Very few tools have been developed to assess suicide risk in the elderly. Suicidal behaviors (SB) are often associated with perturbations of emotional information processing. Recent eye-tracking evidence has indicated specific visual exploration of emotional facial expressions based on age, pathological status, or type of facial emotion expression, which encourage the development of more specific and reliable tools to help in the detection of SB in depressed elderly patients. The aim of this study was to characterize emotional facial information processing in elderly depressed patients with SB vs. patients without SB. We assessed fixation time on their facial expressions (SB n=10 and with noSB n=11). Results showed that depressed SB patients spent more time on emotional regions (i.e. eyes and mouth) of disgust, fear and neutral emotions than did depressed noSB patients. Conversely, fixation time did not differ between the groups for angry, sad and happy emotions. We discuss the difficulties in disengaging attention from emotional information congruent with the patient's emotional state. Specific visual exploration observed in suicidal depressed patients could be used as novel risk factors to more accurately assess and predict suicide risk.