It is clinically important to recognize both bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder (BPD) in patients seeking treatment for depression, and it is important to distinguish between the two. Research considering whether BPD should be considered part of a bipolar spectrum reaches differing conclusions. We reviewed the most studied question on the relationship between BPD and bipolar d...

Patients suffering from bipolar disorder often report negative thoughts and a bias towards negative environmental stimuli. Previous studies show that this mood-congruent attentional bias could mediated by dysfunctions in anterior limbic regions. The Error-Related Negativity (ERN), which originates in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), has been used to research this negativity bias in depresse...

Information about mood reactions to naturally occurring stress in remitted bipolar patients may help elucidate the mechanism by which stressors influence the propensity to manic or depressive relapse in these patients. Using the experience sampling method (ESM), we therefore investigated negative and positive mood states and their reactivity to daily hassles and uplifts in 38 outpatients with r...

Meta-analyses report larger amygdala in subjects with bipolar disorder compared to schizophrenia. However, few studies have compared the size of amygdala in psychotic bipolar disorder with schizophrenia. Here we examine size of amygdala in a sample of 36 patients with psychotic bipolar disorder, 31 patients with schizophrenia and 27 healthy comparison subjects. Patients with schizophrenia had s...

OBJECTIVE Child and adult bipolar patients show both behavioral deficits in face emotion processing and abnormal amygdala activation. However, amygdala function in pediatric relative to adult bipolar patients has not been compared directly. The authors used functional MRI to compare amygdala activity during a face processing task in children and adults with bipolar disorder and in healthy compa...

BACKGROUND The Bipolar Depression Rating Scale is an instrument to measure depression severity in patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This study has reevaluated the psychometric values of the Bipolar Depression Rating Scale through assessing an Iranian sample of patients with bipolar depression. METHODS A total of 60 patients (36 males and 24 females) with bipolar depression referred to...

Effect of Psychoeducation on the Resilience Family Caregivers Patients with Bipolar Disorder

OBJECTIVE Literature review of the controlled studies in the last 18 years in emotion recognition deficits in bipolar disorder. METHOD A bibliographical research of controlled studies with samples larger than 10 participants from 1990 to June 2008 was completed in Medline, Lilacs, PubMed and ISI. Thirty-two papers were evaluated. RESULTS Euthymic bipolar disorder presented impairment in rec...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to determine the relative extent of impairment in social and nonsocial cognitive domains in patients with bipolar disorder compared with schizophrenia patients and healthy comparison subjects. METHODS Sixty-eight clinically stable outpatients with bipolar disorder, 38 clinically stable outpatients with schizophrenia, and 36 healthy comparison subjects completed a ra...