I’m pleased to note that two new journal articles were published in the past few months. They’re based on research that I worked on over the past year (or, actually, 2-3 years).

One is entitled “Sustained attentional engagement is associated with increased negative self-referent decision-making in major depressive disorder” (Dainer-Best, Trujillo, Schnyer, & Beevers, 2017). In this work, we helped solidify the relationship between depression and negative information processing; finding that people who were depressed responded to a task about self-referential stimuli differently behaviorally and in EEG.

The second paper is called “Specificity and overlap of attention and memory biases in depression” (Marchetti, Everaert, Dainer-Best, Loeys, Beevers, & Koster, 2018). Dr. Igor Marchetti was the lead on this project. Here, we used a commonality analysis to begin to tease apart the relationship between measures of depression symptoms and two types of cognitive biases: attention bias and memory bias. In this study, we found that the memory bias in mood-relevant stimuli was reliably related to depressive symptoms but not anxiety symptoms—it was specific here.