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Biomedical subjects

M de Bonis

Publications and source records attributed to M de Bonis.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

Changes in effective connectivity during incidental and intentional perception of fearful faces.

The present fMRI study examined effective connectivity within an emotional network composed of three brain areas: Amygdala (AMY), Anterior Cingulate Cortex (AAC) and Orbito-Frontal (OFC) in processing fearful faces. Two tasks: an incidental perception (gender identification) and an intentional detection (effortful discrimination) task were performed by 14 and 10 young healthy volunteers, respectively. Participants were scanned while viewing fearful, neutral and ambiguous facial expressions. Effective connectivity was assessed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Results show that the hypothetical network fits the experimental data for both tasks and in both hemispheres. The comparison between Tasks 1 and 2 reveals significant differences in strength and direction of the connectivity patterns for the left and to a less stringent threshold for the right hemisphere. The path coefficients analysis suggests that the fearful information generated in AMY, reaches the OFC through the ACC in incidental perception, while in intentional perception, the route followed is in a reverse direction from OFC to ACC. Our findings confirm a differential brain connectivity between incidental and intentional processing of fearful faces.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

A two-process theory of facial perception of emotions.

A two-process probabilistic theory of emotion perception based on a non-linear combination of facial features is presented. Assuming that the upper and the lower part of the face function as the building blocks at the basis of emotion perception, an empirical test is provided with fear and happiness as target emotions. Subjects were presented with prototypical fearful and happy faces and with computer-generated chimerical expressions that were a combination of happy and fearful. Subjects were asked to indicate the emotions they perceive using an extensive list of emotions. We show that some emotions require a conjunction of the two halves of a face to be perceived, whereas for some other emotions only one half is sufficient. We demonstrate that chimerical faces give rise to the perception of genuine emotions. The findings provide evidence that different combinations of the two halves of a fearful and a happy face, either congruent or not, do generate the perception of emotions other than fear and happiness.

Association Learning↗
PubMed1998

Self-concept and mood: a comparative study between depressed patients with and without borderline personality disorder.

Within the framework of Self-Structure Theory, this study investigated the relationship between depressed mood and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) on self and others descriptions, with a special emphasis on the self-structure's valence, that is, its affective, negative and/or positive content. Seventeen DSM-III-R unipolar depressed patients with associated BPD (DSM-III-R axis II) and twelve unipolar depressed patients without BPD were compared to eighteen non-psychiatric controls on four measures of evaluation and of affective discrepancy of descriptions of self and others. Subjects were administered the grid repertory technique. The analysis of the resulting two-way valence matrix, with attributions as columns, and self and others as rows, showed that depressed patients with and without BPD differed from the non-psychiatric controls with regard to negativity of the descriptions. As compared with the two other groups, depressed patients with BPD showed a distinctive pattern characterised by the joint presence of a negative view of self and a larger affective discrepancy for others, with others being conjunctively assigned positive and negative attributes. Despite some limitations, the distinctive pattern evidenced corroborates the conflicted interpersonal relationship and is in keeping with clinical theorising on BPD.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

The comprehension of metaphors in schizophrenia.

Metaphor comprehension was studied in schizophrenics as compared to psychiatric and nonpsychiatric controls. Subjects were asked in a two-condition forced-choice response task to detect the metaphor similar or contrary to a proverb with an abstract meaning. Schizophrenic patients were impaired in both conditions. However, the paranoid patients' performances did not differ from psychiatric and nonpsychiatric controls. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the ability of metaphorizing is preserved in some schizophrenic patients.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Person identification and self-concept in the delusional misidentification syndrome. A case study.

This study on a delusional misidentification patient with both Frégoli symptoms and intermetamorphosis investigates the cognitive structure of others and of the self-representations with a new clustering method (HICLAS conjunctive model). Results show that this patient, free from face recognition disorders, shows severe structural anomalies in the mapping of misidentified others, and of the self. Disturbances in the cognitive structure and person identification are discussed in reference to a psychopathological explanation of the misidentification syndrome.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

[Self concept: toward a cognitive approach to identity disorders].

The development of the concept of self is one of the prominent facts of 20th-century psychology; its conceptualizations are diverse. Within the field of cognitive psychology, concurrent with growing interest in comprehensive theories of personality has been the recent emergence of the self-concept. The self-concept is viewed as the cognitive structure comprised of mental representations of oneself, and responsible for their integration and processing; it appears as the cornerstone of personality. The cognitive modelling of the self-concept currently opens new directions in the approach to identity processes and their psychopathologic disturbances.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy↗
PubMed1992

Cognitive processing of contradictory statements: an experimental study of reasoning on proverbs in schizophrenia.

Twenty schizophrenic patients and 20 normal subjects matched for age, sex and verbal level were asked to identify, from a list of alternatives, the statement that was the most contradictory to each of 8 proverbs. Schizophrenics (whether severely disturbed or not) were found to be less accurate in detecting the contradictions [F(1,18) = 29.21; p less than 0.0001]. No significant differences between undifferentiated and disorganized DSM-III subtypes were observed. The greatest tolerance of contradictory statements was interpreted in terms of violation of the 'no contradiction principle' and examined in the light of a deficit in logical abilities.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

[Formal thinking, logical-discursive operations and schizophrenia: experimental study of a clinical case].

This study, based on a single case experimental design, examined logical reasoning in a schizophrenic meeting the DSM-III criteria. The quantitative assessment carried out by 32 psychiatrists on a rating scale for logical thinking disorders (nine items, six points) of the retranscribed clinical interview showed 1. that the assessments varied in a statistically significant way according to items and psychiatrists, and that these variations were independent of their degree of experience--the correlations between the different items of the rating scale proved to be weak and not significantly different from zero; and 2. the study of the most contradictory statements carried out by a logician using reasoning analysis procedures concluded that there were in fact logical relationships between the subjects the schizophrenic talked about. The results are discussed in relation to the methodology of assessing formal thought in schizophrenia.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Relationship between mood state and information processing of negative versus positive emotional stimuli in brain-damaged patients.

The present study investigates the relationship between affective mood state as assessed by self- and hetero-rating scales and information processing of negative versus positive emotional stimuli in unilateral brain-damaged patients. Results show a high positive correlation between depressive mood scores and rating of self-awareness. Left brain-damaged (LBD) patients do not differ significantly from right brain-damaged (RBD) patients on both rating scales. RBD patients mismatch negative emotional stimuli in the nonverbal matching task. Results are discussed with reference to interaction between expression of emotion and cognition. The selective neglect of negative information is interpreted as a more basic emotional impairment.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Sex differences in latencies of bilateral electrodermal responses.

The present study examined sex differences in the latencies of bilateral electrodermal responses to stimuli presented in monocular vision. The stimuli were spatial-emotional, verbal-emotional, spatial-neutral and verbal-neutral slides, presented for either 35 ms or 1 s. Subjects were 15 males and 15 females. Bilateral latencies were not influenced by type of stimulus or by right/left hemisphere stimulation, which is in keeping with the most recent findings of bilateral electrodermal activity studies. However, females gave a faster right hand than left hand response and appeared to be more lateralized than males. Males showed shorter latencies on the left hand than on the right. These results confirm the importance of gender in experiments using the bilateral recordings of electrodermal activity.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

Mood disorders in left and right brain-damaged patients: comparison between ratings and self-ratings on the same adjective mood scale. Some methodological problems.

In the context of recent developments of the lateralization model of emotions, this study investigates the intensity of depressive mood in left (LBD) and right (RBD) unilateral brain-damaged patients, comparing expression and experience of negative emotion through rating and self-rating scales. Seventeen BD inpatients (6 LBD, 8 RBD and 3 neurological patients without lesions) completed the Zerssen 28-item mood scale a few days after their admission to hospital. During the same period, 2 nurses, one working during the morning, the other during the afternoon and 1 clinician, a neuropsychiatrist, under the instruction of rating the patient mood state, completed independently the same mood scale. Results show that there is a strong agreement among the self-rating and the observers' total scores, which is high between the clinician and the patient but less strong between the 2 nurses and each nurse and the patient. Morever, self-rating scores are significantly different from those attributed by observers. The comparison between LBD and RBD showed that LBD rated themselves as more depressed than RBD, but the differences were statistically significant in the case of the clinician ratings only. These results have been interpreted with reference to methodological problems rather than in terms of a possible discrepancy between expression and experience of affect.

Affect↗
PubMed1983

Sex differences and eye movements.

This study was designed to examine sex differences in eye movements. Recordings were made from 28 right-handed students (15 males and 13 females). Both the number and direction of eye movements elicited during a 10-second time interval following questions presumed to elicit spatial or verbal processing and which had neutral or affective content were recorded. The results showed that (1) global oculomotor activity was significantly higher for females than for males; (2) verbal questions elicited significantly more responses than spatial ones and emotionally charged questions more movements than neutral ones; (3) the proportion of movements to the right was higher than that to the left for females, whereas the reverse was observed in males, and (4) whatever the nature of the question, females tended to look right whereas males tended to look left. Despite some divergent results concerning the presumed power of questions to elicit right or left hemisphere activity, it seems that lateral eye movements show a coherent pattern provided that sex differences are taken into account.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

[Research in psychiatry. Choice of indices or choice of subjects for study? Viewpoint of a researcher in psychology].

Traditionally the enormous diversity in the available empirical psychological indicators has set the trend for their classification. Convenient as they may be, they are seldom satisfying, sometimes inaccurate and usually loaded with evaluative connotations. The idea of "behavioral' versus "non behavioral indicants', which is the topic of our present meeting gives one more example of such arbitrary divisions. The new research strategy proposed here emphasizes the complementary nature of the indices and the necessity of conceptualizing the interrelationships of empirical data in more dimensional ways such as their 'common sense' clarity (transparence) or their polysemic properties. But the classification of indicators, which ever they may be, cannot be of any help in selecting meaningful research problems. With regard to the problem of diagnosis, multiplying indicators often lead to non convergent results and transparent indexes reflect in most cases a "common sense' psychopathology. Therefore, instead of persisting in asking: "with what can we classify patients and diseases?', with the hope to establish universal descriptive categories, we should move to the question of; "How do we classify?'. In this new research strategy several levels of approach can be suggested, among which: - to render explicit the points of view used by psychiatrists to make their diagnosis i.e. to study the content of implicit theories, - to compare systems of classifications (not the classification itself) by using intercultural approaches, - to confront the processes of categorization used in the classification of "natural objects' with those of psychiatric classification, in order to point out differences and similarities. These three directions axes enable to set new ways of cooperation between research workers in psychology and psychiatry.

Anxiety Disorders↗
PubMed1980

Stress, verbal cognitive activity and bilateral electrodermal responses.

The simultaneous recording of bilateral electrodermal activity (skin potential responses) on both right and left hands (the reference electrode being located on the forearm under the skin) on 30 right-handed subjects during the reflection phase of a verbal cognitive task and a stressful situation showed that, contrary to the expectations related to the hypothesis of lateralization, the percentage of equal amplitude (right and left) SPRs is very high in both situations, and SPRs are significantly less lateralized in the stressful stiuation than in the verbal task.

Action Potentials↗
PubMed1978

[Spontaneous electrodermal activity and moods (author's transl)].

The systematic recording of spontaneous electrodermal activity (EDA) on 23 normal subjects during 5 15-min sessions and the self-rating of anxious and/or depressive moods (Q-sort forced choice) shows a positive linear relationship between spontaneous EDA and anxious mood despite a low covariation between those two variables. The same relationship is found with a lower degree of confidence in depression. A greater EDA is observed in the rare pattern of "depression higher than anxiety', than in the opposite case. The discussion of the results deals with the parallelism between a physiological continuum and affective states.

Adult↗
PubMed1975

[Anxiety-trait, anxiety-state, real change, apparent change].

After reviewing the different techniques assessing state-axniety, the authors emphasize the difficulties to distinguish state from trait on the sole basis of factorial content. Results obtained on different samples (mental patients, surgical patients and normal subjects)through two new anxiety self-rating scales (trait and state) are presented. On the basis of these results, the authors show the usefulness of the score indicating the discrepancy between trait and state levels. It appear that the direction (positive or negative) of the difference between trait and state levels gives a better evaluation of the actual state than the state score alone. The results imply the utilization of both self-rating scales (trait and state) in order to obtain the optimal assessment of the state.

Anxiety↗