Many psychiatric disorders affecting mood such as bipolar disorder (BD) are associated with distinct patterns of cognitive impairments that can be revealed during behavioral tests. This project used the autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity measurement techniques to study central and peripheral neural mechanisms of emotional dysfunctions in BD patients. BD patients and control subjects were tested in two tasks. This included an emotional gender categorization task (faces with neutral and emotional expressions were used as stimuli) and a visual oddball task (subject identifies rare target “X” letter and ignores frequent “O” letter, then responds by pressing key to target or by silently counting targets). A C-2 J&J Engineering, Inc. monitoring system was used to record skin conductance levels, heart rate, thoracic pneumogram, and temperature. Results indicate that BD patients made fewer errors in blocks with targets which displayed sad expressions (F = 48.8, p < 0.001). Heart rate in sad conditions had tendency to be lower than in happy and neutral conditions (F = 4.49, p = 0.09). Skin conductance levels tended to be lower in happy conditions than in sad conditions (F = 4.46, p = 0.08). Motor task compared to silent count resulted in a higher number of errors in BD patients (F = 13.88, p = 0.001). These preliminary findings suggest that slow speed of response-related processes, along with the slow and more demanding emotional stimulus-evaluation processes, might be important components of the psychomotor impairments even in asymptomatic (remitted) patients with BD.

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