Depression may influence how children focus on faces, with family history shaping attention patterns

A New study reveals that depression alters children’s attention to facial expressions, with family background affecting these perceptual changes and potentially influencing future mental health outcomes.

A new eye-tracking study suggests that depression may alter what children notice in other people’s faces, and that family history can shape the pattern. Researchers at Binghamton University in New York followed 242 children and their mothers for two years and found that rising depressive symptoms were linked to different attention patterns depending on whether the mother had a history of depression.

In children whose mothers had never experienced depression, worsening symptoms were associated with paying less attention to happy faces. Brandon Gibb, who leads Binghamton’s Mood Disorders Institute, said that may mean depression is eroding a protective response by making positive expressions less compelling. In families where the mother had suffered major depressive disorder, however, stronger symptoms in the child were tied to a growing focus on sad faces.

Kelly Gair, the study’s lead author, said the findings suggest that depression may change attention in ways that persist over time and vary with family background. The team used repeated assessments every six months and eye-tracking tests in which children viewed neutral faces paired with happy, sad or angry expressions. That design allowed the researchers to look not only at whether symptoms predicted later attention shifts, but also whether attention patterns appeared to predict later symptoms.

The work adds to earlier research suggesting that attention biases towards sad faces may be part of depression in young people, and that such patterns may be especially pronounced in children at elevated family risk. Other studies have linked depressive symptoms in youth with longer looking times at sad faces, while some research has found mixed results, underscoring that these attentional patterns are complex rather than fixed. The Binghamton team says it will continue following the children into adolescence to see whether these early attention habits help predict later depression diagnoses.