Affective interference: An explanation for negative attention biases in dysphoria?

Research suggests that individuals with features of depression pay excessive attention to negative information. Yet, it is unclear what aspects of negative information are attended to by these individuals. Different answers to this question suggest different roles for attention in the onset and maintenance of depressive states. This study investigated aspects of emotional information to which college students with and without features of depression attend. Research participants completed an affective lexical decision task and an affective valence identification task. Dysphoric individuals were slow to identify the emotional valence of positive information and nonemotional aspects of negative information (the lexicality of negative words), but were not slow to identify the emotional valence of negative words. An affective-interference hypothesis is advanced to explain these results. Dysphoric individuals are proposed to attend to the emotional content of negative information at the expense of attending to other aspects of the information. Results are related to theories of ruminative coping with depression.