J. Child Psychol. Psychiat. Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 363–368, 2000 Cambridge University Press  2000 Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0021–963000 $15.000.00 Lack of Attentional Bias for Emotional Information in Clinically Depressed Children and Adolescents on the Dot Probe Task Hamid T. Neshat-Doost Isfahan University, Isfahan, Iran Ali R. Moradi Teacher-Training University, Tehran, Iran Mohammad R. Taghavi Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran William Yule Institute of Psychiatry, London, U.K. Tim Dalgleish Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, U.K. The present study utilised a cognitive paradigm to investigate attentional biases in clinically depressed children and adolescents. Two groups of children and adolescents—clinically depressed (N  19) and normal controls (N  26)—were asked to complete a computerised version of the attentional dot probe paradigm similar to that used by MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata (1986). Results provided no support for an attentional bias, either toward depression-related words or threat words, in the depressed group. This finding is discussed in the context of cognitive theories of anxiety and depression. Keywords : Childhood depression, cognitive bias, attentional deployment paradigm, information processing. Abbreviations : BPVS : British Picture Vocabulary Scale ; DSRS : Depression Self-Rating Scale ; RCMAS : Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale ; WORD : Wechsler Objective Reading Dimensions. Introduction Attentional processes have been implicated in the onset and maintenance of emotional disorders (see Power & Dalgleish, 1997 ; Wells & Matthews, 1994). The essential idea is that individuals suffering from, or vulnerable to, emotional disorders may selectively attend to emotional information. This attentional bias would then serve to exacerbate their negative mood state, which would potentially lead to further increases in attentional bias for emotional material. A number of research paradigms exported from mainstream cognitive psychology have been used to examine these claims in groups of emotion- ally disordered individuals, or those high on measures of trait emotionality, and controls (see Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1997, for a review). One such paradigm is the attentional deployment or attentional dot probe task (MacLeod et al., 1986). In this Requests for reprints to : Hamid Neshat-Doost, Dept of Psy- chology, University of Isfahan, Chaharbag Bala, Hezarjerib, Isfahan, Iran. task, on each trial, a word pair appears on a computer screen for a fixed time with one word above and the other below the centre of the screen. On a proportion of the trials, one of the words is threatening and the other is neutral. Participants are required to read the top word on each trial. On critical trials, a probe dot replaces one of the two words. Participants have to press a button as soon as they see the probe. The rationale is that the reaction time (RT) to the dot probe is a measure of visual attention to the word that the dot replaced. Attentional bias for threat would be evident from faster RTs when the dot replaced threat words, relative to neutral words. This experimental methodology has two advantages over self-report questionnaire measures and also over other cognitive methodologies : first, any methodology that uses self-report can only capture those aspects of cognition that can be verbalised, and such data can only provide partial support for a cognitive model of the emotional disorders. Second, the dot probe task provides an opportunity for the direct assessment of visual attention, over and above any response bias, because it requires a neutral response (button press) to a neutral stimulus (dot probe). 363