Traumatic experiences affect negative emotion processing in bipolar disorder

Introduction Patients affected by bipolar disorder type I (BD-I) show a significant emotional impairment during both acute and euthymic phases of the illness, but the influence of negative life experiences is not yet fully understood. Objectives Aim of the present study was to investigate the role of previous traumatic events on negative emotion processing in euthymic BD-I patients. Methods Eighteen euthymic BD-I patients, 7 reporting past traumatic events (T-BD-I), but free of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms at the moment of the evaluation and 11 never exposed to traumas (NT-BD-I), were compared to 24 not traumatized controls (NC). All participants performed a IAPS-based emotional task: they were required to identify vegetable items (targets) among neutral or negative pictures. Accuracy (percentage of correct responses) and mean reaction times (RT) were recorded. Results T-BD-I performed similarly to NC and significantly better than NT-BD-I in terms of accuracy ( Fig. 1 ). No significant between-group effects were observed for mean RT. Conclusions A previous history of traumatic events, without current PTSD symptoms, may significantly impact the negative emotion processing in euthymic BD-I. Interestingly, traumatized patients showed a better accuracy when processing both neutral and negative images, thus suggesting that paying more attention to external stimuli may be a successful compensatory mechanism to cope with potential environmental threats.