Differential Patterns of Social Attention and Memory Profiles in Depression: Evidence From Third-Person Social...

Although social interaction is crucial for human social life, it poses unique challenges for individuals with depressive symptoms. From a third-person perspective, this study employed two cross-sectional experiments to investigate how depressive symptoms modulate whether the benefits of social interaction transfer to attention and memory functions, which constitute core processes underpinning successful interpersonal relationships and social engagement. A total of 72 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and 72 demographically matched healthy control subjects (HCS) were recruited. Experiment 1 adopted a visual search (VS) task in which participants identified socially interactive or noninteractive individuals amid distractors. Experiment 2 included a working memory (WM) task focusing on interpersonal spatial distance and a long-term memory (LTM) task requiring the recollection of paired relationships. Compared to HCS, MDD patients exhibited preserved social attention benefits induced by social interactions, as evidenced by their higher search efficiency for socially interactive dyads. In contrast, MDD patients showed no evidence of either spatial compression effects induced by social intimacy in working memory or enhanced memory traces for interactive dyads in LTM. These findings suggest that individuals with depressive symptoms can benefit from social interactions to facilitate attention, but not memory functioning. Uncovering these differential patterns of attention and memory performance in social cognition challenges the traditional conceptualization of global social cognitive impairment in depression. The current findings also pave the way for targeted social memory training programs and interventions aimed at improving the quality of life in this population.