Memory for emotional faces in major depression 1 Running title: MEMORY FOR EMOTIONAL FACES IN MAJOR DEPRESSION Word Count: 4251 (excluding the abstract, references and tables) Memory for emotional faces in major depression following judgement of physical facial characteristics at encoding Nathan Ridout Aston University, Birmingham, UK Barbara Dritschel University of St Andrews, UK Keith Matthews and Maureen McVicar University of Dundee, UK Ian C. Reid University of Aberdeen, UK Ronan E. O’ Carroll University of Stirling, UK Address for correspondence: Dr Nathan Ridout Clinical and Cognitive Neurosciences Research Group School of Life and Health Sciences Aston University Birmingham, B7 4ET Tel: (+44 121) 2044162 Fax: (+44 121) 2044090 Email:
[email protected] Memory for emotional faces in major depression 2 Abstract The aim of the present study was to establish if patients with major depression (MD) exhibit a memory bias for sad faces, relative to happy and neutral, when the affective element of the faces is not explicitly processed at encoding. To this end, 16 psychiatric outpatients with MD and 18 healthy, never-depressed controls (HC) were presented with a series of emotional faces and were required to identify the gender of the individuals featured in the photographs. Participants were subsequently given a recognition memory test for these faces. At encoding, patients with MD exhibited a non-significant tendency towards slower gender identification (GI) times, relative to HC, for happy faces. However, the GI times of the two groups did not differ for sad or neutral faces. At memory testing, patients with MD did not exhibit the expected memory bias for sad faces.