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Related Experiment Videos

Depersonalization disorder: thinking without feeling.

M L Phillips1, N Medford, C Senior

  • 1Depersonalization Research Unit and Division of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, 103 Denmark Hill, SE5 8AF, London, UK. spmamlp@iop.kcl.ac.uk

Psychiatry Research
|January 5, 2002
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Patients with depersonalization disorder (DP) show reduced brain responses to emotional stimuli. This suggests their absent subjective experience of emotion is linked to altered neural activity in emotion-processing and regulation regions.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psychiatry
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Depersonalization disorder (DP) is characterized by a persistent feeling of detachment from oneself and surroundings.
  • Emotional detachment is a common symptom, impacting patients' subjective experience of emotions.
  • Understanding the neural underpinnings of this emotional detachment is crucial for developing effective treatments.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the neural correlates of emotional processing in patients with depersonalization disorder.
  • To compare brain activity in DP patients versus psychiatric (OCD) and healthy controls when viewing emotionally salient stimuli.
  • To identify brain regions associated with the absent subjective experience of emotion in DP.

Main Methods:

  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Participants included patients with DP, patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and healthy controls.
  • Standardized aversive and neutral scene images were presented, followed by subjective emotional ratings.

    • Main Results:

    • DP patients exhibited significantly reduced activation in emotion-sensitive regions (insula, occipito-temporal cortex) compared to controls when viewing aversive scenes.
    • In DP patients, aversive scenes activated the right ventral prefrontal cortex, a region associated with emotion regulation.
    • The insula, crucial for disgust perception, was activated only by neutral scenes in DP patients, unlike in control groups.

    Conclusions:

    • The absent subjective experience of emotion in depersonalization disorder is associated with diminished neural responses in key emotion-processing areas.
    • Increased activation in emotion regulation regions suggests a compensatory mechanism in DP patients.
    • These findings highlight altered neural processing of emotional stimuli as a core feature of depersonalization disorder.