Selective Attention Hypothesis in Iranian Patients with Depressive Disorder

The present study aimed to investigate the selective attention hypothesis in a group of Iranian outpatients with depressive disorder. Causal-comparative and correlation methods were used to analyze the data. A total of 60 subjects participated in this study. Of them, 31 patients diagnosed with depression were assigned in the depressive group and 29 nondepressed individuals were observed as control (normal) group. Participation in this study was completely voluntary. Participants were screened by the structured clinical interview for the DSM-IV (SCID), answered to Beck depression inventory–II (BDI-II), and took part in the Visual Dot-Probe (VDP) task. The data were analyzed by correlation analysis and t test. The results showed that the depressed group got higher score in BDI compared to the control group and this difference was statistically significant. But the differences between two groups regarding attention biases were not large enough to be significant. The following results could be because of the different reasons such as culture. Furthermore, there were several limitations to the current study which are discussed.