Cognitive factors associated with depression and anxiety in adolescents: clinical applications

This presentation will discuss the roles of attentional and memory biases on depression and anxiety among adolescents. Regarding attentional biases, findings of our previous studies suggest that negative attentional bias, but not positive attentional bias, was related to severity of anxiety symptoms. In our latest study on memory bias, 142 adolescents completed the item-method directed forgetting paradigm to measure their positive and negative memory bias. The results showed that participants with higher level of anxiety tended to exhibit more negative memory bias (i.e. they exhibited more difficulty in forgetting negative stimuli). More depressive symptoms were related to less negative memory bias, probably due to the avoidance tendency of depressive individuals. An anxiety x depression interaction effect on positive attentional bias was obtained. Individuals with higher anxiety levels would exhibit less positive memory bias only when they were also having high depression level. Implications on cognitive intervention strategies will be discussed.