Duration of Recovery and Susceptibility to Criticism-Induced Information-Processing Biases in Major Depression

Major depression is a highly prevalent disorder that affects millions of individuals worldwide each year. Theorists such as Aaron T. Beck (1967; 1976) revolutionized how depression is understood by proposing that cognitive factors are involved in the etiology and maintenance of depression. Inspired by his and other cognitive theories, researchers have documented negative biases in attentional and interpretive cognitive processing of emotional stimuli in individuals with major depressive disorder. However, very little cognitive research has been conducted on individuals with a past history of depression or at different time points since their depressive episode. Also, researchers have not tested whether criticism, a known psychosocial predictor of relapse, exacerbates information-processing biases in people with major depression or reactivates such biases in people in various stages of recovery from the disorder (Butzlaff & Hooley, 1998; Hooley & Gotlib, 2000).