Objective To explore the influence of repeatedly suprathreshold and subthreshold presentation of sad face on the attention bias of college students with depressive symptoms.Methods Five hundreds college students were extracted by using the cluster sampling method.The Beck Depression Inventory(BDI)and Self-rating Depression Scale(SDS)as the screening tool were applied to select the healthy control group(C),low-level depression group(B)and high-level depression group(A),20 participants in each group.Twenty neutral faces and 52 sad faces were selected from the emotional faces library researched and prepared by the Institute of Psychology of Chinese Academy of Sciences.Each face was suprathresholdly(1 000 ms)and subthresholdly(14 ms)presented four times to the participants.In the point detection task,the scores of response time,correction rate and attention bias of 3 groups to the emotional faces were recorded.Results (1)There was no statistically significant difference in the correction rate for 4 times suprathreshold and subthreshold presentations of sad faces between three groups;(2)The average response time of the fourth superathreshold and subthreshold presentation of sad faces in the group A was significantly lower than that of the first three times,the difference was statistically significant(P＜0.01),but the times of sad emotional face presentation had no statistically significant difference between the group C and B(P＞0.05);(3)compared with the group C,for the suprathesholdly presented sad face,the group A had significant a main effect in the aspects of average score of attention bias and sad emotional face presentation times(F=12.032,P＜0.05;F=91.637,P＜0.05),and had a significant interaction effect among the duration and times of presentation and group types(F=16.766,P＜0.05);(4)the group A showed significant attention bias of suprathresholdly presented sad faces at first,second and third time of presentation,but lost the bias at the fourth time.Conclusion The fourth time of sad face presentation could eliminate the attention bias of college students with high-level depression.