Effect of Emotional Valence on Working Memory of Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures (PNES) Patients

Background  The present study investigated how emotional valence influenced the working memory of patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) as compared to healthy individuals. Methods  Emotional-N-Back task (E-N-back task) was administered to 15 PNES patients and equal number of healthy individuals. A 2 × 3 one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used. Correct detection (accuracy) and reaction (RT) time were recorded as behavioral performance measures. Results  The ANOVA result of correct detection (accuracy) measure revealed significant difference in the performance of patients with PNES as compared with healthy individual, F (2, 48) = 17.08, p  = 0.001. However, on the measure of reaction time (RT), both groups performed equally and there was no significant difference, F (2, 48) = 1.13, p  = 0.33. Also the results of present study showed that patients with PNES are quicker in identifying unpleasant picture stimuli, which is evident from their mean comparison: unpleasant ( M  = 65.55, SD  = 15.66), pleasant ( M  = 58.22, SD  = 20.03), and neutral ( M  = 45.11, SD  = 23.13). Conclusion  Conclusively, the finding of the present study shows a significant effect of emotional valence on working memory of patients with PNES on the measure of correct detection (accuracy), but not for second measure, i.e., reaction time this clearly reveals that patients with PNES are poor at emotional-cognitive integration, specifically at working memory level.