In this pre-registered study, we investigated whether facial expressions were implicitly encoded when forming impressions of others, and whether differences between people in their encoding of angry and happy facial expressionswere related to depressive symptoms. These questions were addressed using the category confusion or Who Said What (WSW) paradigm. Results indicated that both angry and happy emotional expressions from human faces were encoded when forming impressions of others, with no difference in strength of encoding between both.We observed no evidence for associations between encoding of angry or happy facial expressions and depressive symptoms.

Biased attention is assumed to play an important role in the etiology and maintenance of depression and depressive symptoms. In this paper, we used data from a categorization task and an associated model to assess the attentional bias of people with varying levels of depressive symptoms. Attentional bias was operationalized as the parameter estimate in a prototype model of categorization. For estimation, we used a Bayesian hierarchical mixture approach. We expected to find a positive correlation between depressive symptoms and an AB for negative material and a negative correlation between depressive symptoms and a bias toward positive material. Despite good model fit, Bayesian regression analyses revealed weak or moderate evidence in favor of the null model assuming no association between attentional preferences and depressive symptoms, both for negative and positive material.