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Updated: Jun 27, 2026

Use of a Psychophysiological Script-driven Imagery Experiment to Study Trauma-related Dissociation in Borderline Personality Disorder
Published on: March 8, 2018
Neuropsychological characteristics of highly dissociative healthy individuals
Christine Amrhein1, Simone Hengmith, Markos Maragkos
1Section of Clinical Psychology and Psychophysiology, University Hospital of Psychiatry, Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Germany.
Objective:
Dissociative disorders are characterized by disturbances in several neuropsychological domains, especially attention, memory, and consciousness. As a tendency to dissociate can also be observed in healthy individuals, and may be a risk factor for the development of dissociative disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we were interested in the neuropsychological characteristics of these participants.
Method:
We examined attention, memory, and executive control functions in 17 high and 17 low dissociators without any psychiatric or neurological disorder and without prior experiences of trauma.
Results:
High dissociators showed relative performance deficiencies in tasks of memory for associative, context-dependent verbal material, visuospatial working memory, and executive control functions in terms of a heightened perseveration tendency and false positive errors.
Conclusion:
These cognitive deficits are consistent with models of dissociative disorders and dissociation in PTSD assuming a hippocampal and prefrontal dysfunction as a core factor. Mild cognitive impairments in otherwise healthy high dissociators may constitute a risk factor for the development of later PTSD or dissociative disorders.
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