Emotional Conflict Resolution Differences in Epilepsy and Psychiatric Disorders
Abstract number :
2.205
Submission category :
6. Cormorbidity (Somatic and Psychiatric)
Year :
2022
Submission ID :
2204094
Source :
www.aesnet.org
Presentation date :
12/4/2022 12:00:00 PM
Published date :
Nov 22, 2022, 05:23 AM
Authors :
Daniel Soper, BA – MGH and Harvard Medical School; Sydney Cash, M.D., Ph.D. – MGH and Harvard Medical School; Angelique Paulk, Ph.D. – MGH and Harvard Medical School
Rationale: Psychiatric comorbidity in patients with intractable epilepsy can reveal an overlap between seizure disorders and psychological state. Understanding the mechanism underlying this intersection could help alleviate symptoms in both epilepsy and psychiatric disorders. We used the unique opportunity provided by intracranial recordings to study how behavioral correlates of anxiety and other disorders manifest in neural data. We combined neural data with task data, self-report questionnaires, and psychological evaluations to understand the impact of psychiatric disorders and epilepsy on the participants. Our hypothesis was that psychiatric disorders impair emotional conflict resolution, but not cognitive conflict resolution, especially in participants with high anxiety scores.
Methods: We ran an emotional conflict resolution task (ECR) and Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT) with three groups: patients with intractable epilepsy undergoing clinical, invasive electrode placement to locate seizure onset (n=29), psychiatric patients with diagnosed disorders (n=15), and healthy controls (n=36). ECR and MSIT, classic Stroop task variants, measure conflict resolution through reaction time and accuracy on sequential presentations of congruent and incongruent trials. ECR contains an emotional stimulus while MSIT does not. To incorporate psychiatric state, participants completed self-report questionnaires, and implanted patients also underwent neuropsychiatric testing as part of their clinical work-up. The reaction times, trial accuracies, stimulus conditions, and theta-band coherence between brain regions were analyzed for each participant.
Results: We found decreased accuracy for trials of incongruent fear in the participants with epilepsy (p< 0.005) and psychiatric disorders (p< 0.01). Healthy controls exhibited no such deficit. We saw increase in theta-band coherence between the amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate cortex during ECR compared to MSIT (p< 0.01). This coherence increase is also seen for incongruent versus congruent trials of ECR. Coherence is suppressed between amygdala and dorsal-lateral pre-frontal cortex for incongruent ECR trials with negative emotional valence (p< 0.01).
Cormorbidity (Somatic and Psychiatric)