Previous research has found that depression is characterised by biased processing of emotional information. Although most studies have examined cognitive biases in isolation, simultaneous examination of multiple biases is required to understand how they may interact and influence one another to produce depression vulnerability. In this study, the attention and memory biases of currently depressed, previously depressed, and never depressed women were examined using the same stimuli and a unified methodology. Participants viewed negative, positive, and neutral words while their eye (...) gaze was tracked and recorded. After a distraction task, participants completed an incidental recognition test that included words from the eye-tracking task and new words. The results supported the hypothesised mediation model for positive words: currently depressed women had a reduced attention bias for positive words and, in turn, had poorer memory for positive words relative to never depressed women. Previously depressed women, however, showed a lack of coherence between attention and memory biases for positive words. The groups did not differ in their attention or memory biases for negative words. The findings provide novel evidence in support of a causal link between the absence of protective attention and memory biases for positive information in clinical depression. (shrink)

Health professionals are inundated by the surfeit of health apps while lacking guidance to help them critically evaluate whether a particular health-monitoring app is safe, likely to lead to clinical benefit, and not introduce additional liability. Our objective is not to argue for or against the use of mobile health-monitoring apps but to illuminate the associated ethical issues and provide recommendations to guide the ethical decision-making process for clinicians who are considering the use of a mobile health-monitoring app. To this (...) end, the Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists is used as a framework to situate recommendations. (shrink)