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It has not been possible to identify evidence to support the hypothesis that depressed children and adolescents would show an attentional bias towards depression-related words or threat-related words. This research supports earlier work indicating that depression is not linked with attentional bias, but involves cognitive biases at more elaborative phases of information processing. It is proposed that attentional bias for emotional information is a function of psychopathologies for which the emotion of fear is an integral element.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers often report a range of memory difficulties. Standardized neuropsychological tests have been used to investigated these cognitive problems. Memory function in child and adolescent patients diagnosed with PTSD has been investigated using the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test (RBMT), to determine whether observed memory problems reflect a general cognitive deficit. PTSD subjects showed poor overall memory performance, particularly with regard to prospective and orientation items of the RBMT.

An experiment was conducted to examine memory for emotional trait adjectives in depressed children and adolescents. Two groups of children and adolescents, clinically depressed participants and nonclinical controls, were compared on computerized versions of recall and recognition memory tasks. Three groups of words (positive trait adjectives, negative trait adjectives, and categorized neutral words) were used in the experiment. Results showed that the depressed group recalled significantly more negative adjectives than positive adjectives, whereas the control group recalled the same number of positive and negative adjectives. This effect was predicted by the association between age and level of depression, with the depression-related bias becoming stronger with age. Signal detection analysis revealed that the depressed group did not show any bias in the recognition task. The findings are discussed with respect to cognitive theories of depression with consideration of the developmental implications.