The Beck’s cognitive model of depression posits that the formation and maintenance of negative depressive cognitive schemas are key factors underlying the development and manifestation of depressive disorders. Among these schemas, negative attentional bias and negative memory bias are typical manifestations. The former usually manifests as a depressive individual's tendency to focus on negative stimuli, difficulty in disengaging attention, facilitated attention, or avoidance of attention. Meanwhile, the latter manifests as individuals with depressive tendencies displaying poorer suppression and better retrieval of negative memories compared to healthy controls. Moreover, since attention selection regulates the gateway for sensory information to enter perceptual and memory processing channels, and existing memory experiences in turn guide an individual's attention search and selection, the combined cognitive bias hypothesis posits that negative attention bias and negative memory bias can mutually influence each other and are closely related.

Existing research has established the presence of negative attentional bias and negative memory bias in individuals with depressive disorders as well as their subclinical counterparts (i.e., those with depressive tendencies). However, there is a divergence of views regarding the relationship between negative attentional bias and negative memory bias in individuals with depression. While some studies have demonstrated interrelations among these cognitive biases, others have found no significant associations between them.

To address the current situation, this study adopts the research paradigm proposed by Jia et al. (2023), which integrates the directed forgetting (DF) task with the emotion-induced blindness (EIB) task. In this experiment, we recruited both individuals with depressive tendencies and generally healthy controls to test whether the memory bias observed in the former would bias emotional attentional selection, thereby giving rise to an attentional bias. The experiment is divided into three stages. In the first stage, both groups engaged in intentional memory and intentional forgetting of negative pictures. In the second stage, the negative pictures from the previous stage are used as emotional distractors in the EIB task. Finally, in the third stage, participants complete a recognition test for the negative pictures. In this experiment, the Chinese version of the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) was used to screen participants. Based on the BDI-II scores, college students with scores ≤13 were assigned to the healthy controls, while those with scores ≥19 were assigned to the Depression tendencies. A total of 75 valid participants were recruited, including 41 individuals with depressive tendencies and 34 healthy controls.

Our results indicated that both groups exhibited higher recognition accuracy for the negative to-be-remembered (TBR) pictures compared to those negative to-be-forgotten (TBF) pictures, thereby demonstrating a comparable DF effect. However, the impact of intentional memory encoding on the EIB effect revealed significant intergroup differences. Specifically, a significant between-group difference in target-identification accuracy on the EIB task emerged only when negative TBR pictures served as distractors; no comparable group differences were observed for negative TBF, novel negative, or neutral distractors. Moreover, for individuals with depressive tendencies, negative TBF and novel negative distractors elicited a clear EIB effect relative to the neutral-distractor condition, whereas negative “to-be-remembered” distractors did not. But this pattern was contrary to the EIB effects observed in the healthy controls.

These findings indicate that the memory-encoding task successfully induced a memory bias in individuals with depressive tendencies. Although this memory bias was not evident in the picture-recognition task, it reshaped emotional attentional selection during the EIB task by triggering attentional avoidance of negative to-be-remembered stimuli, thereby giving rise to a memory-driven bias. These findings not only deepen our understanding of memory biases in individuals with depressive tendencies by demonstrating that the picture-recognition task within the directed-forgetting paradigm is unsuitable for stably capturing such biases, but also provide robust support for the integrated cognitive bias hypothesis of depression, showing that memory biases in depression can influence and elicit attentional biases.