Can Everyday Visual Stimuli Help Parents Identify Depression Risks in Adolescents?

Abstract

Studies have shown that participants’ mood affect the style of processing of visual stimuli (Global processing bias and Local processing bias). While negative mood is associated with increase in local processing, positive mood was observed to increase in global processing bias. Building upon these findings, the current study investigates the relationship between depression and visual processing using a local and global processing task. However, unlike previous studies on the subject, the current research doesn’t use Navon’s task (Navon, 1977) or Kimchi’s figures (Kimchi, 1988); instead, this research uses a power point presentation of slides with pictures of everyday visual stimuli (for example- a slide containing pictures of two cars of same make and model but different colors). This enables the researchers to investigate whether parents can use non-standardized, everyday visual stimuli to asses depression risks in adolescents. In the task, a set of 12 slides containing pictures of everyday visual stimuli (prepared by a professional illustrator) were presented to the participants. Eight pre-created slides were used to enable global processing (identical and negative match stimuli), while four pre-created slides were used to enable local processing. The participants (adolescents) were instructed to identify and report the pair of stimuli as ‘same’ or ‘different’ in each slide. As a control measure, the age, education level, city and socio-economic background of the participants (N=20) is kept same. It was observed that the participants who showed evidence of the global processing bias (identifying images as ‘same’) scored low on Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). By contrast, participants who prioritized local processing (identifying the images in slides as ‘different’), self-reported significantly higher level of depression on BDI. This observation indicates that depression maybe associated with a reduction in the tendency to prioritise global-level processing in adolescents. Thus, enabling parents of adolescents to use daily activities to identify risk of depression in the children and being proactive with respect of mental health of depression. To best of the author’s knowledge this is first study in this area. Therefore, it requires further investigation and cross-cultural studies.