Abstract
Hypomanic personality, hyperthymic temperament and irritable temperament are considered as psychological vulnerability factors to bipolar disorders. Semantic memory is impaired in bipolar patients. Spreading activation is among the probable candidates for accounting this impairment. The aim of this study was to assess spreading activation according to vulnerability factors continuum to determine whether it could be a factor of vulnerability to bipolar disorders. A sample of 61 healthy volunteers was recruited. Spreading activation was assessed by semantic mediated priming implemented in a double lexical decision task. Results shown that semantic mediated priming was negatively associated to hyperthymic temperament and irritable temperament. Impairment in semantic memory, and more specifically spreading activation, appear to be a cognitive factor of vulnerability to bipolar disorders. Our results can contribute to a better understanding of semantic impairment in vulnerable population and in bipolar disorder.
Highlights
Bipolar disorders (BD) are characterized by a succession of manic and depressive episodes with remission periods between symptomatic ones
One hypothesis to explain these language-related issues is the impairment of spreading activation in semantic memory (Andreou et al, 2013), which refers to the fact that, when a concept is activated in memory, some of this activation automatically spreads to related concepts in semantic memory (Collins and Loftus, 1975)
Subclinical characteristics were assessed with the short French version of the Temperament Evaluation of the Memphis, Pisa, Paris, and San Diego Autoquestionnaire (TEMPS-A) (Krebs et al, 2006), the French version of the Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS) (Terrien et al, 2015) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) (Beck et al, 1961)
Summary
Bipolar disorders (BD) are characterized by a succession of manic (or hypomanic) and depressive episodes with remission periods between symptomatic ones. Several studies have found deficits affecting verbal association, semantic contents, prosody and verbal fluency (Andreou et al, 2013; Radanovic et al, 2013). One hypothesis to explain these language-related issues is the impairment of spreading activation in semantic memory (Andreou et al, 2013), which refers to the fact that, when a concept is activated in memory, some of this activation automatically spreads to related concepts in semantic memory (Collins and Loftus, 1975). Automatic spreading activation is one of the processes that have been proposed to account for semantic priming (SP). SP corresponds to the fact that a target word (e.g., cat) is processed faster and more accurately when it is preceded by a semantically related word (e.g., dog) than when it is preceded by an unrelated word (e.g., chair)
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