Abstract
Aims
Studies examining the use of specific emotion regulation (ER) strategies in patients with severe alcohol use disorder (AUD) are mainly focused on intergroup comparisons to the detriment ...of intragroup variability. Yet, these patients are in fact characterized by emotional deficits of varying severity, and we seek to identify different patterns of ER strategies in people with AUD during their first year of abstinence.
Methods
Based on the ER strategies used by a large sample of patients with AUD, we applied cluster analysis to identify the existence of subgroups using distinct patterns of adaptive and nonadaptive strategies. To characterize these groups, we compared their clinical characteristics and then their emotional regulation strategies to those of control consumers.
Results
A first cluster, representing 61% of the sample, is constituted by individuals with high adaptive strategy scores and high nonadaptive strategy scores; a second cluster, representing 39% of the sample, corresponds to individuals with low adaptive strategy scores and high nonadaptive strategy scores. The individuals in these two clusters differed in terms of anxiety level and abstinence time. Compared with control consumers, the use of nonadaptive ER strategies remained lower for the two clusters, while the use of adaptative strategies differed.
Conclusions
Our results support the idea of considering the heterogeneity of emotional capacities in individuals with AUD during the first year of abstinence. The identification of these profiles suggests either the existence of different adaptive ER capacities at baseline or a specific recovery of adaptive strategies over this period.
People with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD-nonPPD) are described as insensitive to others and as relentlessly pursuing their goals. A severe form of antisociality is observed in psychopathic ...personality disorder (ASPD-PPD). In the spectrum of emotional reactivity, people with ASPD-nonPPD present more emotional dysregulation, whereas people with ASPD-PPD exhibit a reduced or nonexistent emotional response. To personally engage people with ASPD-nonPPD and ASPD-PPD, we used emotionally charged autobiographical stimuli, specifically their self-defining memories (SDMs). As these participants exhibit high control over voluntary responses, we measured neurophysiological indicators (heart rate variability (HRV) and electrodermal activity (EDA)). In the resting task and the SDM task, people with ASPD-PPD had significantly higher HRV, suggesting higher emotion regulation abilities. Conversely, the EDA of people with ASPD-nonPPD and ASPD-PPD reflects less activation during the SDM task than when resting. We suggest that people with ASPD-PPD are more adaptive to stimuli that provide less emotional activation. Furthermore, the correlation analysis results suggested that the higher people with ASPD-PPD score on Factor 1 of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), the less emotional activation they exhibit. This low activation (EDA) associated with good emotion regulation abilities (HRV) is thought to be the signature of psychopathy.
Destination Memory in Korsakoff's Syndrome El Haj, Mohamad; Kessels, Roy P. C.; Matton, Christian ...
Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research,
06/2016, Volume:
40, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Background
Context memory, or the ability to remember the context in which an episodic event has occurred (e.g., where and when an event took place), has been found to be compromised in Korsakoff's ...syndrome. This study examined whether a similar deficit would be observed for destination memory, that is, the ability to remember to whom an information was previously transmitted.
Methods
Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome and healthy controls were instructed to tell proverbs to pictures of celebrities. In a subsequent recognition test, they had to indicate to which celebrity they had previously told the proverbs. Participants also completed a neuropsychological battery including a binding task in which they were required to associate letters with their correspondent locations to assess context memory.
Results
Results showed worse binding and destination memory in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome than in controls. In the Korsakoff group, destination memory was significantly correlated with and predicted by performances on the binding task.
Conclusions
The binding process seems to be impaired in Korsakoff's syndrome, a deficit that may account for the destination memory compromise in the syndrome, and probably, for the difficulty to retrieve the “where and when” of an encountered event.
Destination memory refers to the ability to remember to whom information was previously transmitted. Our study tested destination memory in Korsakoff's syndrome. Participants with Korsakoff's syndrome were instructed to tell proverbs to pictures of celebrities. In a subsequent recognition test, they had to indicate whether they had previously told that proverb to that celebrity or not. Results showed compromise of destination memory in Korsakoff's syndrome. Note. Elvis Presley's image is covered by creative commons copyright.
The reduced specificity of positive and negative autobiographical memories observed in anorexic (AN) patients may reflect a global disturbance in their emotional information processing. However, ...their emotional difficulties may differ according to the subtype of AN, implying possible differences in the manifestation of autobiographical memory impairments. The aims of the study were (1) to confirm the autobiographical memory deficits in AN patients in terms of specificity and wealth of memories, and (2) to compare autobiographical deficits according to the AN subtype: restrictive type (AR) or binge/purging type (AB). Ninety-five non-clinical (NC) individuals and 95 AN patients including 69 AR and 22 AB patients were administered the Williams’ and Scott’s Autobiographical Memory Test. The results confirmed a lack of specificity regardless of emotional valence in the overall AN patient group without any distinction of subtype, which was linked to the number of hospitalizations. When the AN subtype was considered, AR patients demonstrated reduced specificity for negative memories only, suggesting differences in emotional functioning or in the mechanisms underlying reduced specificity between AR and AB patients. Furthermore, the overall AN group demonstrated lower variability and complexity in their memory content than the NC group. However, this difference in the complexity of recalled memories was only found in response to negative cues. When AN subtypes were considered, AR patients showed fewer complex memories than NC individuals. Beyond a reduced specificity, AN patients also depict a poverty in the range of event recall and a difficulty in developing narrative content. The clinical implications of such autobiographical memory deficits need to be further investigated.
This study examined the association between emotional eating, emotion dysregulations, and interoceptive sensibility in 116 patients with obesity by distinguishing an “awareness” and a “reliance” ...component of interoceptive sensibility. Deficits in interoceptive awareness were only associated with more emotional eating in obesity through less interoceptive reliance and more emotion dysregulations. The results suggest that good interoceptive awareness can increase the risk of emotional eating if not supported by good interoceptive reliance. Interoceptive reliance, like the ability to trust, positively consider, and positively use inner sensations, should be a privileged target of psychotherapeutic interventions in obesity.
Early aversive events are key factors in the development of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and are known to impact the ability to produce specific autobiographical memories and to modify ...self-construction. The present study assessed identity construction in forensic inpatients suffering from ASPD by comparing the characteristics (specificity, integration, valence, topic and period) of self-defining memories (SDM) of persons with ASPD hospitalised in a forensic hospital to those of control participants. Offenders with ASPD had difficulty in retrieving purely specific single events and tended to recall memories comprising multiple events. In addition, they produced significantly less meaning-making from their past experiences (low integration). These characteristics of SDM could be due to a defensive process used by offenders with ASPD in which they do not integrate aversive experiences, thereby creating a vicious circle where maladjustment of their personality is maintained.
Future Thinking in Korsakoff Syndrome El Haj, Mohamad; Moustafa, Ahmed A; Nandrino, Jean-Louis
Alcohol and alcoholism (Oxford),
07/2019, Volume:
54, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Prior research has been mainly concerned with the ability of patients with Korsakoff syndrome (KS) to project themselves into the past. Little is known about the patients' ability to project ...themselves into the future. We therefore compared past and future thinking in patients with KS.
We invited patients with KS and control participants to retrieve past events and reconstruct future events. Participants were also invited to rate subjective characteristics (i.e. time travel, emotional feeling, and visual imagery) of the past and future events.
Patients with KS demonstrated low specificity, time travel, and emotional experience during past and future thinking. However, while lower emotional experience was observed in patients with KS than in the control participants during future thinking, no significant differences were observed between the two populations during past thinking. Regarding within-group comparisons, patients with KS demonstrated no significant differences between past and future thinking in terms of specificity, time travel, and visual imagery; however, they demonstrated higher emotional experience during past than during future thinking. Regarding control participants, they demonstrated no significant differences between past and future thinking in terms of specificity, time travel, emotional experience, and visual imagery.
Our findings demonstrate a diminished ability to construct specific future scenarios as well as a diminished subjective experience during future thinking in KS.
Background and Objectives
While sex differences in cognitive abilities have been extensively studied in healthy populations, little is known about these differences in patients with Korsakoff ...syndrome (KS).
Methods
We investigated sex differences in verbal episodic memory, inhibition, and flexibility in 25 patients with KS and 25 control participants.
Results
The analysis demonstrated no significant differences between women with KS and men with KS on episodic memory and flexibility, but higher inhibition was observed in women with KS compared with men with KS. Regarding control participants, no significant differences were observed between women and men on inhibition or flexibility, but higher verbal episodic memory was observed in women compared with men. Verbal episodic memory and flexibility seem to be equally affected in women and men with KS, whereas inhibition seems to be more affected in men than in women with KS.
Conclusions and Scientific Significance
Our findings highlight cognitive sex differences in KS in executive function. Critically, our findings are the first quantitative data about episodic performances (and cognitive performances in general) of women and men with KS. (Am J Addict 2020;29:129–133)
Thanks to the current advances in the software analysis of facial expressions, there is a burgeoning interest in understanding emotional facial expressions observed during the retrieval of ...autobiographical memories. This review describes the research on facial expressions during autobiographical retrieval showing distinct emotional facial expressions according to the characteristics of retrieved memoires. More specifically, this research demonstrates that the retrieval of emotional memories can trigger corresponding emotional facial expressions (e.g. positive memories may trigger positive facial expressions). Also, this study demonstrates the variations of facial expressions according to specificity, self-relevance, or past versus future direction of memory construction. Besides linking research on facial expressions during autobiographical retrieval to cognitive and affective characteristics of autobiographical memory in general, this review positions this research within the broader context research on the physiologic characteristics of autobiographical retrieval. We also provide several perspectives for clinical studies to investigate facial expressions in populations with deficits in autobiographical memory (e.g. whether autobiographical overgenerality in neurologic and psychiatric populations may trigger few emotional facial expressions). In sum, this review paper demonstrates how the evaluation of facial expressions during autobiographical retrieval may help understand the functioning and dysfunctioning of autobiographical memory.
Highlights • We observed higher phasic high frequency of Heart Rate Variability (HF-HRV) in post-withdrawal. • We also observed more difficulties in emotion processing in post-withdrawal. • We showed ...an improvement of HF-HRV with longer abstinence. • We observed a positive correlation between craving and increased HF-HRV.
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