Depression risk and electrocortical reactivity during self-referential emotional processing in 8 to 14 year-old girls.

Cognitive vulnerabilities, such as a negative self-referential processing bias, have been theorized to play a causal role in the development of depression. Indeed, depression is associated with the endorsement and recall of more negative and fewer positive emotional words (i.e., recall biases) in the self-referential encoding task (SRET). In addition, currently depressed adults and adolescents, compared to healthy controls, show an enhanced late...