Depression impairs the ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions: Evidence from the Garner task.

We assessed dysphoric and clinically distressed individuals' ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions using the Garner speeded-classification task. Garner's paradigm tests the ability to selectively focus on a single relevant dimension while ignoring variations on other, irrelevant, ones. In the present task, the stimuli were faces of men and women expressing happy, angry, and neutral emotions.

Interpersonal deficits meet cognitive biases: memory for facial expressions in depressed and anxious men and women.

Memory biases for negatively vs. positively valenced linguistic information in depression are well documented. However, no study so far has examined the relationship between depression and memory for facial expressions.