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Understanding and treating depersonalisation disorder: a functional MRI study

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 22:10 authored by Nicholas Medford, Barbara Brierley, Michael Brammer, Edward Bullmore, Anthony David, Mary Phillips
This study examines emotional memory effects in primary depersonalization disorder (DPD). A core complaint of DPD sufferers is the dulling of emotional responses, and previous work has shown that, in response to aversive stimuli, DPD patients do not show activation of brain regions involved in normal emotional processing. We hypothesized that DPD sufferers would not show the normal emotional enhancement of memory, and that they would not show activation of brain regions concerned with emotional processing during encoding and recognition of emotional verbal material. Using fMRI, 10 DPD patients were compared with an age-matched healthy control group while performing a test of emotional verbal memory, comprising one encoding and two recognition memory tasks. DPD patients showed significantly enhanced recognition for overtly emotive words, but did not show enhancement of memory for neutral words encoded in an emotive context. In addition, patients did not show activation of emotional processing areas during encoding, and exhibited no substantial difference in their neural responses to emotional and neutral material in the encoding and emotional word recognition tasks. This study provides further evidence that patients with DPD do not process emotionally salient material in the same way as healthy controls, in accordance with their subjective descriptions of reduced or absent emotional responses. © 2006 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging

ISSN

0925-4927

Publisher

Elsevier

Issue

2-3

Volume

148

Page range

93-102

Department affiliated with

  • BSMS Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2015-08-20

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2015-08-20

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