New Publication by Katharina Hierl on Negative Emotional Biases in the Longitudinal Course of Depression

We congratulate Katharina Hierl on a new publication in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

In this study, negative biases in emotional processing were investigated in a large longitudinal sample of 232 patients with depression and 496 healthy controls, comprising a total of 1,395 observations across multiple time points. Such processing biases play a central role in cognitive models of depression and have been proposed as an important mechanism contributing to the development and maintenance of depressive symptoms.

The new publication shows that negative biases, here assessed as the tendency to attribute more negative valence to a neutral facial expression, were more strongly associated with current depressive symptom severity than with diagnostic status. Patients who were largely symptom-free at a given assessment did not differ substantially in their valence ratings from healthy controls.

These findings suggest that alterations in emotional processing in depression may not necessarily represent a stable characteristic of the disorder but may instead be closely linked to an individual’s current symptom state. Longitudinal studies such as this one contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how cognitive-emotional processes change over the course of depressive disorders. A better understanding of when such biases are most pronounced may ultimately help inform interventions that are more closely tailored to different stages of illness and the individual needs of patients.

Hierl, K., Wollweber, L., Lemke, H., Esser, L., Abati, C., Grotegerd, D., Dohm, K., Kraus, A., Leehr, E. J., Kjærstad, H. L., Kanske, P., Dannlowski, U., & Förster, K. (2026). Emotional processing biases in the longitudinal course of major depressive disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders, 414, 122362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2026.122362