From attentional blink to emotional dysregulation: a study on the cognitive and emotional interactions in depression

This study aimed to investigate how negative emotional faces affect target identification in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) patients using an emotion-induced blindness (EIB) paradigm, and to compare their performance with that of non-clinical controls.

An EIB task was administered to 32 patients with MDD and 32 non-clinical controls recruited between March and December 2023. Target identification accuracy was assessed using facial expressions of disgust, fear, sadness, and neutrality as distractors presented at three different lags before the target: 100 ms, 300 ms, and 700 ms.

Patients with MDD showed lower overall target identification accuracy than non-clinical controls. Accuracy was lowest at lag 1, indicating stronger early-stage interference. Among the distractors, disgust faces were associated with the lowest target identification accuracy and produced stronger emotional interference than fear or sad faces. In addition, target identification accuracy following disgust and fear distractors was associated with MDD status.

These findings suggest that patients with MDD show reduced rapid target identification performance in an EIB task. Disgust faces may produce particularly strong interference during emotional attentional processing, and performance under disgust and fear distractor conditions may serve as behavioral indicators associated with MDD status.