Influence of personality and neuropsychological ability on social functioning and self-management in bipolar disorder

Functional outcome and social cognition in bipolar disorder: Is there a connection?

“…In the studies we included, the most consistently used task was the RMET, with discrepant results for accuracy in participants with BD compared with controls. Lower scores were reported by some of these studies (54), but most of them failed to reach significance [41, 42, 44, 50]. Similarly, some (but not all) RMET task results correlated positively with functioning [41, 55].…”

“…Overall, patients with BD displayed significantly impaired recognition, identification and discrimination of facial emotions, compared with HC [44–47]. They performed particularly poorly on happiness and disgust recognition [48, 49].…”

“…With regard to social functioning, we noted significantly poorer overall functioning among patients with BD than among HC [41, 42]. Mood symptoms seem to be the determining factor for social functioning during acute episodes [43], with more severe mood symptoms being associated with poorer social functioning [38, 39, 44, 45]. Depressive symptomatology was associated with lower functional outcome across the domains of mood, cognition, leisure, sociability, spirituality, self-esteem, independence, identity, work and the overall score, as well as with GAF scores [39].…”

Theory of Mind Deficits and Their Influence on Functional Impairment in Remitted Phase of Bipolar Disorder

“…The link between ToM and functioning has been explored in all the symptomatic phases of BD, that is, depressive, 18,[33][34][35] manic, 18,33 , and mixed phases. 35 Studies that explored the association between ToM and functioning in euthymic/remitted BD had shown mixed results, with some reporting significant association 15,16,18,22,24,36 and others not. 17,20 A possible link exists between depressive symptomatology and global functioning, where depressive symptoms explain 17%-35% of the variance in the global functioning.…”

“…[22][23][24]33,36,[43][44][45] Based on the correlation between functional impairment and illness variables like longer duration of illness, 30 higher number of episodes, especially depressive episodes, and longer time spent in depressive episodes in our study, we hypothesize that functional impairment could be a consequence of the progressive nature of the illness rather than subsyndromal depressive symptoms. There is some evidence in the short-or long-term (3 to 10 years) prospective studies that the severity and frequency of bipolar depressive episodes contribute to cognitive decline and poor psychosocial functioning, 46 possibly through dysregulated neuroinflammation. 47 Similar inconsistent evidence also suggests that the frequency and severity of manic episodes may lead to poor psychosocial functioning and cognitive impairment, 48 but our study did not find such association.…”