Depression impairs the ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions: Evidence from the Garner task

We assessed dysphoric and clinically distressed individuals' ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions using the Garner speeded-classification task. Garner's paradigm tests the ability to selectively focus on a single relevant dimension while ignoring variations on other, irrelevant, ones. In the present task, the stimuli were faces of men and women expressing happy, angry, and neutral emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed the Garner task, focusing on gender and ignoring emotion (Experiment 1) and focusing on emotion and ignoring gender (Experiment 2). Results suggest that dysphoric individuals exhibited more difficulty ignoring the emotional dimension of social stimuli even under specific instructions to do so than nondysphoric individuals. In Experiments 3 and 4, we replicated these results in clinically distressed and nondistressed individuals. The results of Experiment 3 further suggested that depression was more closely associated with the inability to selectively ignore emotion than was social anxiety. Experiment 4 confirmed that this failure of selective attention was specific to processing emotional, and not gender features. The implications of these findings for cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression are discussed.