Across different paradigms and psychological measures, memory bias (and not attentional bias) represents a primary mechanism in depression, a recent study found. Researchers investigated the degree of specificity and overlap of attentional and memory biases for depressotypic stimuli in relation to depression and anxiety by means of meta-analytic commonality analysis. By including 4 published studies, researchers considered a pool of 463 healthy and subclinically depressed individuals, different experimental paradigms, and different psychological measures. They found:

• Memory bias is reliably and strongly related to depression and, specifically, to symptoms of negative mood, worthlessness, feelings of failure, and pessimism.
• Memory bias for negative information was minimally related to anxiety.
• Moreover, neither attentional bias nor the overlap between attentional and memory biases were significantly related to depression.