BRIEFS from APS:

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, during the next few days I’ll be summarizing research presented at the Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science. I’ll start today with a non-so-brief report of a study I know very well, mostly because it’s a study I presented yesterday morning.

For the last few years, I’ve been interested in exploring why children of depressed parents ( those at ‘familial-risk’) are more likely than their peers to become depressed. In fact, up to 50% of these children will develop depression by the end of their teen years. If we understand why these kids develop depression, we could create preventive intervention for these children. In our research, we have focused our efforts on examining factors that keep these children from regulating their emotions effectively. For example, we are interested in whether kids at familial risk for depression have biases in their attention and perception  of emotions, which may lead to lower levels of happiness (positive affect) and higher levels of sadness. Read More