Emotional Meaning in Context in Relation to Hypomanic Personality Traits: An ERP Study

Abstract

The ability to integrate contextual information is important for the comprehension of emotional and social situations. While some studies have shown that emotional processes and social cognition are impaired in people with hypomanic personality trait, no results have been reported concerning the neurophysiological processes mediating the processing of emotional information during the integration of contextual social information in this population. We therefore chose to conduct an ERP study dealing with the integration of emotional information in a population with hypomanic personality trait. Healthy participants were evaluated using the Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS), and ERPs were recorded during a linguistic task in which participants silently read sentence pairs describing short social situations. The first sentence implicitly conveyed the positive or negative emotional state of a character. The second sentence was emotionally congruent or incongruent with the first sentence. We analyzed the difference in the modulation of two components (N400 and LPC) in response to the emotional word present at the end of the “target” sentences as a function of the HPS score and the emotional valence of the context. Our results showed a possible modulation of the N400 component in response to both positive and negative context among the participants who scored high on the Mood Volatility subscale of the Hypomanic Personality Scale. These results seem to indicate that the participants with hypomanic personality traits exhibited specificities in the integration of emotions at the level of the early-mobilized neurocognitive processes (N400). Participants with hypomanic personality traits found it difficult to integrate negative emotional contexts, while simultaneously exhibiting an enhanced integration of positive emotional contexts.

Neuroanatomical and functional substrates of the hypomanic personality trait and its prediction on aggression

“…Consistently, such associations are also observed in trait anger and physical aggression ( Grunebaum et al., 2006 ; Perroud et al., 2011 ; Meter et al., 2016 ). One possible explanation for these associations is the combined impact of the hypersensitive behavioral approach system, abnormal functioning in the motor and prefrontal cortices, and dysregulation of emotion ( Etkin et al., 2015 ; Frank et al., 2014 ; Strakowski et al., 2005 ; Terrien, Gobin, et al., 2015 ). In contrast, findings about the association between HPT and impulsivity are mixed.…”

Neural Correlates of Semantic Inhibition in Relation to Hypomanic Traits: An fMRI Study

“…But relatively little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms of language or thought disorders in hypomania. To the best of our knowledge, only two studies have so far investigated the relationship between language processing and hypomanic traits ( 20 , 21 ). Both were conducted by our team and used event-related potentials (ERPs) to assess the electrophysiological component of language processing.…”

“…Both were conducted by our team and used event-related potentials (ERPs) to assess the electrophysiological component of language processing. The first one investigated the integration of contextual information in emotional situations, showing that participants with higher hypomanic traits exhibit specific modulation of the N400 component ( 20 ). The second one investigated the ability to inhibit semantic content in relation to HPS scores ( 21 ), with participants performing a semantic ambiguity resolution task adapted from Hoenig and Scheef ( 22 ).…”

Modulation of the N400 component in relation to hypomanic personality traits in a word meaning ambiguity resolution task

“…One of the main limitations when studying neurocognitive impairment among patients with BD is the potential impact of their psychotropic treatment, as it can have its own cognitive side‐effects . To circumvent the impact of drugs on electrophysiological patterns and adopt a dimensional approach to symptoms, some studies have focused on nonclinical individuals with hypomanic personality traits . Hypomanic personality describes people who are cheerful, optimistic, extraverted, self‐confident, and energetic, although sometimes also irritable, rude, and reckless or irresponsible .…”

“…The presence of language abnormalities, like logorrhea, tangentiality, or flight of ideas, typical of the manic episodes in BD is also present, at a subsyndromal level, in individuals with hypomanic traits. So far, only one cognitive study of hypomanic personality traits has explored the modulation of the N400 component in the field of language, evaluating the deployment of contextual processing with emotional information. In this study, participants with high levels of hypomanic personality traits exhibited specificities in the processes relative to the integration of the emotional context, at the level of early mobilized neurocognitive processes.…”