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Throughout the day, people use language to communicate about themselves and others. Evaluative aspects of language allow them to convey their feelings and opinions of people and events around them, both positive and negative (Martin, 2020). In doing so, the words and phrases people choose to evaluate reflect the value system of the speakers and their community (Hunston&Thompson, 2000) . As social animals, being part of a group and maintaining relations with others is crucial for humans ’ survival (Holt, 2018). Negative evaluative language involving criticism and disapproval is therefore a painful experience across cultures (Eisenberger& Lieberman, 2004; Fiske&Yamamoto, 2005) . In contrast, positive evaluative language involving praise and approval is universally satisfying. On the other hand, the affective processes through which individuals interpret social evaluation regulate their motivation behavior during social interaction with positive emotions facilitating social approach behavior while negative emotions reinforcing social avoidance behavior (Liu & Gao, 2012). Rather than passively accepting personal feedback from social others, people with good mental health tend to frame self-images associated with being competent and possessing socially desirable attributes, preferentially engaging in positive social evaluation while avoiding negative information (Greenwald, 1980; Young et al., 2020) . Moreover, they can regulate criticism-induced thoughts and feelings to protect their self-esteem and maintain emotional well-being (Vanderhasselt et al., 2015). However, social feedback processing and concurrent affective responses are hardly uniform across individuals, particularly for individuals with depression.
Clinically and sub-clinically depressed populations are characterized by altered processing of social feedback. They show decreased anticipation and enjoyment for positive social feedback and when receiving one, they hardly perceive cues of acceptance and belonging in such feedback (Evraire & Dozois, 2011) . Instead, they are highly sensitive to negative social feedback, tending to anticipate negative feedback from others, attribute these negative outcomes to themselves, and display amplified negative affective responses afterward (Cuellar & Johnson, 2009; Joiner & Coyne, 1999; Joiner & Katz, 1999) . Such distorted processing and perception of positive and negative social evaluation is inline with the cognitive model of depression which posits that individuals with depression are characterized by a negatively-biased cognition in all aspects of information processing including memory, interpretation, and attention, particularly attention, through which sensory information enters our conscious experiences (Beck, 2008). Thus, impairments of goal-directed attention may have downstream effects on other functions (Keller et al., 2019) . However, till now, little is known about how attention to evaluative words of different valence differs between individuals with and without depression.