Differences of Attentiveness of Persons with Anxiety and Unipolar Depressive Disorders

Research Summary
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January 18, 2019
Introduction
The article in focus is a study conducted by Weinberg et al. (2016), about the differences of person, with anxiety and unipolar depressive disorders, when it comes to focusing on threats and rewards. They conducted an experimental study including 145 patients with the said disorders. They also included 32 control subjects in order to verify their results. Nonetheless, the study stems from the previous belief that people with such disorders were inclined to have a greater attention span to threats, as compared to rewards, which is the underlying reason for its symptoms. As the study concludes, the researchers were then able to find out that by analyzing these neural markers of attention and analyzing how they differ between the two scenarios (e.g., threats and rewards), could become an effective mechanism to track the early onset of depression. In the succeeding sections of this study, these results would be elaborated in further detail.
Differences in Attention and Mental Diseases
As stated earlier, the primary purpose of the study in focus was to determine early symptoms of anxiety and unipolar depressive disorders by measuring the differences in a person’s attentiveness. In this case, attentiveness was implicitly defined as the person’s ability to focus on specific visual stimuli and the thoughts that are associated with such. This dependent variable is what is commonly known as ‘motivated attention.’ Being a difficult variable to measure, the researchers utilized the Late Positive Potential (LPP) and Putative Index of Motivated Attention. These two measurements have allowed them to see whether the subject’s attention is still focused on the threat or reward, or have already shifted to another. Another set of terms that is worth noting in this study are those that concern the illnesses that they are trying to study. For one, unipolar depressive disorder refers to a type of depression where an individual only ...