Korean J Psychopharmacol.  2009 May;20(3):125-134.

Mood-Congruent Bias to Emotional Word, Face, and Scene Stimuli in Patients with Bipolar Mania : Comparison to Normal and Schizophrenia Subjects

• Kim SJ
• Kang JI
• Lee JH
• An SK
• Cho HS

Abstract

OBJECTIVE
Patients with bipolar mania have difficulty in recognizing or attending to negatively affective stimuli and have an affective bias, which is congruent with the current mood. However, previous reports have adopted words or facial pictures, not scenic pictures as affective stimuli. In this study, patients with mania performed the word, face and scenic picture-based affective go-nogo tasks respectively. The results were compared to those of patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.
METHODS
Twenty patients with bipolar mania, 20 patients with schizophrenia, and 20 healthy comparison subjects, matched for age, gender and intelligence, performed affective gonogo tasks which contained happy/sad words, facial pictures, and scenic pictures respectively.
RESULTS
On the scenic picturebased affective go-nogo task, a significant interaction between subject group and target valence emerged {F (2, 57)=4.86, p<0.05}. Pairwise comparison showed the manic patients required significantly more time to respond to sad than to happy stimuli (t=3.22, df=19, p<0.01), but schizophrenia patents and healthy subjects did not differ in time to respond to happy or sad stimuli (t=1.95, df=19, p=0.07 ; t=-1.23, df=19, p=0.23).
CONCLUSION
Manic patients displayed a mood-congruent bias toward affective scenic pictures, but not toward affective word or facial pictures. This finding suggests that complex and scenic stimuli may give a more influence on the affective arousal state and therefore increase the mood-congruent bias in manic patients.

Keyword

Bipolar disorder; Mania; Go-nogo task; Mood-congruent bias

MeSH Terms

Arousal
Bias (Epidemiology)
Bipolar Disorder
Humans
Intelligence
Schizophrenia