EMOTION PROCESSING IN BIPOLAR DISORDER: FASTER REACTIONS, LOWER RECOGNITION

Emotion IAT is a tool that measures an individual's unconscious way of processing emotions. This test asks individuals to quickly associate words that belong to two categories (e.g., "positive" and "negative"). The test results are determined by how quickly the two categories are associated. In this study, we compared 30 euthymic bipolar patients with 30 healthy controls using emotion IAT and facial recognition tests. Facial recognition tests used sadness, happiness, fear, and disgust emotional pictures. In patients with bipolar disorder in remission, there is a tendency to associate positive emotions (p = 0.03) and negative emotions (p=0.02) more quickly on the emotion IAT task than in healthy people. In the facial recognition test, there was no difference between the control group and happiness (p>0.05), but sadness (p=0.03), fear (p=0.02), and disgust (p=0.03) showed poor performance compared to the control group. These results suggest that patients with bipolar disorder have difficulty processing emotions.

This could be related to the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Patients with bipolar disorder tend to be optimistic and impulsive, which suggests that this leads to reduced awareness of negative emotions.