Euthymic patients with predominantly manic polarity avoid happy faces in a dot probe task.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Psychiatry
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Attentional biases in bipolar disorder (BD) are inconsistently reported, particularly in euthymic states.
• Understanding emotion-related attentional biases and emotion regulation is crucial for BD diagnostics and treatment.
• Previous research suggests mood-congruent attentional biases in bipolar patients.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate emotion-related attentional biases in bipolar patients across different states (depressive, euthymic with manic or depressive polarity).
• To explore the relationship between attentional biases and emotion regulation strategies in bipolar disorder.
• To compare attentional patterns between bipolar patients and healthy controls.

Main Methods:

• Employed a dot-probe task (DPT) with happy and sad faces presented at 250 ms and 1250 ms.
• Recruited participants: 20 bipolar depressed (BP-acute-D), 32 euthymic bipolar (BP-euth-M/D), and 20 healthy controls (HC).
• Assessed emotion regulation strategies using two validated questionnaires.

Main Results:

• Euthymic bipolar patients with manic polarity (BP-euth-M) showed reduced attention to happy faces compared to HC in short presentation trials.
• Depressed bipolar patients (BP-acute-D) exhibited lower cognitive reappraisal and perspective-taking, and higher suppression, catastrophizing, and rumination.
• Euthymic bipolar patients with depressive polarity (BP-euth-D) demonstrated lower perspective-taking and higher catastrophizing; BP-euth-M scored higher in rumination.

Conclusions:

• Reduced attention to happy faces in BP-euth-M may serve as a protective mechanism against mania triggers.
• Increased attention to sad faces among individuals using more reappraisal suggests cognitive effort or enhanced tolerance for negative stimuli.
• Findings highlight distinct attentional patterns and emotion regulation deficits in different bipolar disorder states.