Discuss Bipolar
Blog to discuss being Bipolar
Researchers have found that heightened emotional arousal in bipolar disorder patients, compared with mentally healthy individuals, may enhance their reaction time to cognitive tasks.
However, when emotionally aroused, deficits in response inhibition ??” the ability to suppress responses that are no longer needed or are inappropriate ??” may also become more apparent.
“It is well known that optimal performance requires an intermediate level of emotional intensity ??” too little emotional intensity has negative effects on performance, whereas too much emotional intensity may lead to disorganization of thinking and physical self-control,” Stephanie Krüger, from Charite-Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Germany, and colleagues comment.
The researchers induced a transient intense sadness and a relaxed mood state in 34 euthymic patients with bipolar I disorder, 22 of their mentally healthy siblings, and 33 unrelated mentally healthy individuals. After this, the participants performed a stop-signal paradigm to measure response and response inhibition times.
The patients with bipolar disorder and their siblings required less time to become sad as a result of mood induction and cried more frequently than mentally healthy individuals, suggesting emotional vulnerability could be an endophenotype of bipolar disorder.
Following the induction of intense sadness bipolar disorder patients had reaction times on the stop-signal paradigm that were around 100 ms faster than following induction of a relaxed mood state.
In contrast, both mentally healthy siblings and controls reacted faster when in a relaxed mood state than after intense sadness induction. The researchers note that the reaction times of bipolar disorder patients were similar to those of mentally healthy individuals following intense sadness induction, but were much slower following relaxed mood induction.
In contrast, response inhibition times were longer in bipolar disorder patients after induction of transient sadness compared with controls in both sad and relaxed states.
Healthy siblings also showed longer inhibition times under relaxation compared with controls, but this was not statistically significant.
“Our data provide evidence that patients with bipolar disorder have faster reaction times under strong emotional arousal. In contrast, under the same emotional arousal the inhibitory deficits become more apparent,” the researchers report.
“It is possible that patients with bipolar disorder will function best under moderate emotional arousal,” they conclude.
“Psychotherapeutic strategies for emotion regulation could help patients with bipolar disorder to deal better with their strong emotions and could improve inhibitory deficits.”
MedWire (www.medwire-news.md) is an independent clinical news service provided by Current Medicine Group, a trading division of Springer Healthcare Limited. © Springer Healthcare Ltd; 2010
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UK researchers have found that individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) respond differently to positive mood induction than healthy individuals.
They hope that knowing how patients with bipolar disorder respond to positive mood induction could enable clinicians to help BD patients better regulate their mood. Guidance during cognitive behavioral therapy could teach patients to become aware of the automatic changes to emotional processing that occur during the early stages of mood elevation.
In the present study, Anne Farmer (Institute of Psychiatry, London) and co-authors investigated the effect of positive mood induction on emotional processing in 15 euthymic individuals with BD and 19 gender- and age-matched healthy controls, using the Affective Go/No-go test (AGNG) and the Cambridge Gamble task (CGT).
The researchers manipulated mood using a feedback paradigm, which was found to be more effective than more widely used techniques. Mood induction using the “Go” task significantly elevated mood in both groups, and this effect lasted until after completion of the AGNG and CGT.
Patients in the BD group responded more slowly on the CGT when presented with more difficult decisions (when the probability of being correct was lower) than controls, and this effect remained significant after adjusting for age. However, no differences were seen between groups in the extent to which participants altered their betting behavior as a function of risk, or in the quality of decision making.
The authors say that the slow responses made in the face of a difficult decision reflect the BD patients’ “difficulty in overcoming the inclination to engage in behavior with a high potential for negative consequences, which may have been elicited by the mood induction.”
Furthermore, bipolar patients showed a positive emotional bias on the AGNG, as they made significantly more inappropriate responses to positive distractor words than negative distractor words following mood induction, whereas controls did not.
“These data suggest that individuals with BD and healthy controls respond to positive mood induction in a qualitatively different manner,” write the authors in the journal Psychological Medicine.
Farmer et al say that positive mood induction in euthymic individuals with BD “is sufficient to re-establish the biases in information processing and disruptions to decision-making behavior that occur in the manic state.”
MedWire (www.medwire-news.md) is an independent clinical news service provided by Current Medicine Group, a part of Springer Science+Business Media. © Current Medicine Group Ltd; 2009
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