Modality-specific alterations in the perception of emotional stimuli in Bipolar Disorder compared to Healthy Controls and Major Depressive Disorder.

OBJECTIVES: Affect identification accuracy paradigms have increasingly been utilized to understand psychiatric illness including Bipolar Disorder (BD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). This investigation focused on perceptual accuracy in affect identification in both visual and auditory domains among patients with BD, relative to Healthy Controls (HC) and patients with MDD. Demographic and clinical variables, in addition to medications were also investigated. METHOD: The visual Facial Emotion Perception Test (FEPT) and auditory Emotional Perception Test (EPT) were administered to adults with BD (n=119) and MDD (n=78) as well as HC (n=66). RESULTS: Performance on the FEPT was significantly stronger than on the EPT irrespective of group. Performance on the EPT did not significantly differentiate the groups. On the FEPT, BD samples had the greatest difficulty relative to HC in identification of sad and fearful faces. BD participants also had greater difficulty identifying sad faces relative to MDD participants though not after controlling for severity of illness factors. For the BD (but not MDD) sample several clinical variables were also correlated with FEPT performance. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that disruptions in identification of negative emotions such as sadness and fear may be a characteristic trait of BD. However, this effect may be moderated by greater illness severity found in our BD sample.

Auditory memory decrements, without dissimulation, among patients with major depressive disorder.

Questions have been raised about whether poor performance on memory tasks by individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) might be the result of poor or variable effort or disease-related disruption of neural circuits supporting memory functions. The present study examined performance on a measure of task engagement and on an auditory memory task among 45 patients with MDD (M age = 47.82, SD = 19.55) relative to 32 healthy controls (HC; M age = 51.03, SD = 22.09). One-hundred percent of HC and MDD volunteers performed above the threshold for adequate effort on a formal measure of task engagement. The MDD subjects performed significantly more poorly than the HC subjects on an auditory learning and memory test. The present results suggest that auditory memory difficulties do occur among those with MDD and that decrements in performance in this group may be related to factors other than lack of effort.

Caregiver support service needs for patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease.

Little is known about the service needs for persons caring for individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In this study, the level of support service need for caregivers of individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer disease (AD; N=55) and MCI (N=25) was compared with normal controls (N=44). Study partners (ie, caregivers) completed questionnaires about their service needs and participants' neurobehavioral symptoms, functional abilities, and frailty. Total, social, and mental health service needs were significantly different among the 3 groups (P<0.0001), with MCI and AD caregivers reporting more need for services as compared with the normal control group. There was no significant difference between MCI and AD groups for total and social service need. In the MCI group, caregiver's service need was related to neurobehavioral symptoms and frailty, whereas service need among the AD caregivers was related to functional disability and frailty. Caregivers of individuals with MCI are already experiencing a need for increased services comparable to that of individuals caring for AD patients, though the pattern of patient-related factors is different between the 2 patient groups. These findings suggest possible areas of intervention that could be considered at the earliest stages of memory loss.