Current dysphoria, past major depression, and memory for affective facial expressions

Memory for others’ sad affective facial expressions may be relevant to depression risk, given that biases have been linked to major depression and transient sad mood states. However, no study has addressed whether stable, subclinical dysphoria is associated with similar biases, or whether depression history might moderate a relationship between dysphoria and memory for affective facial stimuli. These questions were examined in the present study. Participants completed an incidental encoding task involving sad, happy, and neutral facial expression stimuli, and then they later completed a recognition memory task. Results indicated that dysphoria alone was not associated with memory differences. Rather, past depression moderated the effect of dysphoria such that dysphoric individuals with past depression showed greater recognition memory for sad faces relative to dysphoric/never depressed and nondysphoric/formerly depressed individuals. Findings are partially consistent with cognitive models of depression and could have implications for interpersonal functioning in susceptible or resilient individuals.