# 2006 article on cognitive/perceptual aspects of DP. fMRIs



## Dreamer (Aug 9, 2004)

* Psychiatry Res. 2006 Nov 3; [Epub ahead of print] Links
Emotional memory in depersonalization disorder: A functional MRI study.

Medford N, 
Brierley B, 
Brammer M, 
Bullmore ET, 
David AS, 
Phillips ML.
Division of Psychological Medicine, P.O. Box 68, Institute of Psychiatry, DeCrespigny Park, London SE5 8AF, UK.*

"This study examines emotional memory effects in primary depersonalization disorder (DPD). A core complaint of DPD sufferers is the dulling of emotional responses, and previous work has shown that, in response to aversive stimuli, DPD patients do not show activation of brain regions involved in normal emotional processing.

We hypothesized that DPD sufferers would not show the normal emotional enhancement of memory, and that they would not show activation of brain regions concerned with emotional processing during encoding and recognition of emotional verbal material.

Using fMRI, 10 DPD patients were compared with an age-matched healthy control group while performing a test of emotional verbal memory, comprising one encoding and two recognition memory tasks.

 DPD patients showed significantly enhanced recognition for overtly emotive words, but did not show enhancement of memory for neutral words encoded in an emotive context.

In addition, patients did not show activation of emotional processing areas during encoding, and exhibited no substantial difference in their neural responses to emotional and neutral material in the encoding and emotional word recognition tasks.

[/u] This study provides further evidence that patients with DPD do not process emotionally salient material in the same way as healthy controls, in accordance with their subjective descriptions of reduced or absent emotional responses.[/u]
PMID: 17085021 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

*Related Links/Articles*
Depersonalization disorder: thinking without feeling.[Psychiatry Res. 2001]
(we know this one article already)

Differential amygdala activation during emotional decision and recognition memory tasks using unpleasant words: an fMRI study.[Neuropsychologia. 2001]

Emotional context during encoding of neutral items modulates brain activation not only during encoding but also during recognition.[Neuroimage. 2005]

Emotional memory: separating content and context.[Psychiatry Res. 2005]
Corticolimbic blood flow during nontraumatic emotional processing in posttraumatic stress disorder.[Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2006]


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## Guest (Nov 11, 2006)

good post


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## Catharsis (Jul 2, 2006)

It's true. Good that they proved it.


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