Contact: Sasha Steinberg
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Research conducted by a faculty member and graduate student in Mississippi State’s Department of Psychology may provide a better understanding of how depression works and ultimately lead to new treatment innovations.
Assistant professor E. Samuel “Sam” Winer said the article co-authored with clinical psychology doctoral student Taban Salem was based on a statistical review of the dot-probe paradigm—one of the most common tasks used to assess how people come to understand emotional information.
Their findings are published in the January 2016 issue of Psychological Bulletin, one of the leading journals in the field of psychology.
The dot-probe task allows researchers to examine attentional biases by measuring the speed with which participants respond to a dot following emotional (positive or negative) or neutral information.
“In this task, we know that individuals with depressed symptoms value or approach negative words, but what we’re now learning is that they are also avoiding positive words,” Winer said. “This means that individuals suffering from depression may not only not value reward in the way that nondepressed individuals do, but that they may in fact devalue reward. That is, they may be less likely to approach rewarding information (such as something hopeful) than anything else.”
“The subtle but very important idea that depressed individuals avoid positivity is not routinely addressed in current treatments, so the hope is that this new way of conceptualizing depression could ultimately be used to affect clinical change,” he emphasized.
Winer holds doctoral and master’s degrees in psychology and also earned a bachelor’s in English with Highest Distinction from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Salem is a graduate of MSU’s clinical psychology master’s program and holds a bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Visit www.psychology.msstate.edu to discover more about MSU’s psychology department.
Winer may be contacted at e.samuel.winer@msstate.edu.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.