خلاصة:
Objective: The present study aimed to investigate the selective attention hypothesis in a group of Iranian outpatients with depressive disorder.Methods: Causal-comparative and correlation methods were used to analyze the data. A total of 60 subjects participated in this study. Of them, 31 patients diagnosed with depression were assigned in the depressive group and 29 nondepressed individuals were observed as control (normal) group. Participation in this study was completely voluntary. Participants were screened by the structured clinical interview for the DSM-IV (SCID), answered to Beck depression inventory–II (BDI-II), and took part in the Visual Dot-Probe (VDP) task. The data were analyzed by correlation analysis and t test.Results: The results showed that the depressed group got higher score in BDI compared to the control group and this difference was statistically significant. But the differences between two groups regarding attention biases were not large enough to be significant.Conclusion: The following results could be because of the different reasons such as culture. Furthermore, there were several limitations to the current study which are discussed.
ملخص الجهاز:
Selective attention happens in many psychological disorders such as social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression, especially toward emotionally valued stimuli, despite the attempts of the these patients to overlook them (Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996).
Selective attention has various meanings in dif- ferent disorders; for instance, individuals with social phobia fail to distract their attention from social threat; this issue has been indicated in several studies (Amir, Elias, Klumpp, & Przeworski, 2003; Asmundson & * Corresponding Author: Mahdi Bagheri, MSc Address: Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
The emotional informa- tion processing in anxiety and depression also accom- panies by biases, so patients with these disorders tend to attend the negative stimuli more than positive ones (Mathews & MacLeod, 2005).
Therefore, depressed individuals cannot distract their attention from negative stimuli to other types of stimuli (Thomas, Raoux, Everett, Dantchev, & Widlöcher, 1996).
The visual dot-probe task (VDP) (MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986) is a computerized task designed to iden- tify hypothesized attentional biases that correlate with different psychopathology like depression (Beck A.
In this context, the main study aim was to investigate the selective attention in a group of Iranian patients with depressive disorder to illustrate "the selective attention hypothesis" in Iranian culture.
, 1992; Leung, Lee, Yip, Li, & Wong, 2009; Suslow & Dann- lowski, 2005), which supported the attention biases to- ward negative stimuli or sad faces in individuals with depressive disorder.