Abstract
A previous study indicated that depressed people show a smaller inhibition of return effect (IOR) for negative stimuli in a spatial cueing task. According to Mogg and Bradley (2005), a depressive bias in attention is observed only when self-relevant negative stimuli are presented. To test this proposition, the present research compared the IOR of depressed people for negative trait adjectives and for other negative words. We found that depressed participants had a smaller IOR for trait adjectives than for other negative words. This result suggests that depressed individuals have difficulty in disengaging their attention from negative self-relevant stimuli.
