Affective Processing in Pediatric Bipolar Disorder and Offspring of Bipolar Parents

Abstract

Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) is characterized by biased processing of emotional information. However, little research in this area has been conducted in youth with BD and at-risk individuals. The goal of this study was to determine whether children with BD displayed comparable or more severe manifestations of this bias relative to offspring of parents with BD.

Materials and methods: The sample (n = 57 children and adolescents) included 18 individuals with BD (age: 13.63 ± 2.99; 8 females), 16 offspring of parents with BD (age: 11.83 ± 2.96; 9 females) and 23 healthy controls (HC) (age: 12.789 ± 3.087; 8 females). All participants performed the Affective Go/No-Go (AGN) and the Rapid Visual Processing (RVP) tasks of the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB).

Results: Relative to HC, individuals with BD responded faster to correct trials and committed an elevated number of commission errors across all affective conditions of the AGN task. By contrast, BD offspring showed intact performance accuracy but quicker response times than HC. Post-hoc analyses revealed that this behavioral pattern was observed in BD offspring with mental health problems but not in healthy BD offspring. Overall, mean reaction times and total number of errors in the RVP task were comparable across groups.

Conclusions: In line with previous findings, subjects with BD encountered difficulties in processing affective information. The tendency toward faster but accurate responses to affective stimuli observed in BD offspring may be a marker of attentional bias toward affective information and constitute a vulnerability marker for mood disorder.

FIG. 1.

Group performance (means ± SE) on affective Go/No-Go. Mean correct latencies in youth with bipolar disorder (BD), healthy controls (HC), affected BD offspring (AOffspring), and unaffected BD offspring (UOffspring). The results indicate significantly reduced RTs during the correct trials in subjects with BD and Aoffspring compared with HC.

FIG. 2.

Group performance (means ± SE) on affective Go/No-Go. Total number of commission errors to positive and negative stimuli in youth with bipolar disorder (BD), healthy controls (HC), and offspring of BD parents. The results indicate a significantly higher number of errors in youth with BD compared to HC (BD > HC).