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Scientists have identified an area in the brain of people with bipolar disorder that affects the brain’s response to happiness, news.ro reports
A team of British researchers from University College London (UCL) has uncovered the brain mechanisms behind mood disturbances in bipolar disorder. A new study by the UCL team shows that sudden mood swings, even if they only last a few seconds, can profoundly change how the brain responds to pleasant experiences in people with bipolar disorder. Previous research has shown that mood can make us experience events in a more positive or negative way – whether we have bipolar disorder or not. When we are in a good mood, we see things in a more positive light, which makes the good mood last and grow. Similarly, when we are angry, we perceive negative outcomes as worse, which can cause the anger to persist or escalate.
This “rush” of emotion can influence how we perceive events and the decisions we make. “Imagine going to a new restaurant for the first time. If you happen to be in a good mood, you might perceive the experience as better than it actually is,” said co-lead study author Dr. Liam Mason of the University College London School of Psychological and Language Sciences. However, new research published in the journal Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science has found that people with bipolar disorder are more susceptible to this emotional bias. Along with this, the researchers have also identified the connections in the brain that determine the effects of this emotional bias. In the new study, the researchers investigated what happens in the brains of people with bipolar disorder while they play a computer roulette game, in which they experience good and bad outcomes. Using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers scanned the brains of 21 participants with bipolar disorder and 21 control participants as they played the game. This allowed them to track the participants’ neural responses when they won or lost. They measured how these “reward signals” in the brain were affected by micro-fluctuations in emotion over a few seconds. To achieve this, the researchers used a computational model that quantified the mood boost that the participants experienced based on the outcome.They assessed whether during periods of upward momentum (a winning streak), the brain becomes more sensitive to subsequent wins, and vice versa. The team observed increased neural activity in the anterior insula, an area of the brain associated with transient mood states, during periods of upward momentum in both control participants and participants diagnosed with bipolar disorder. However, only participants with bipolar disorder showed a more pronounced effect of this impulsivity on the perception of gains and losses. The researchers observed increased activation in the striatum, an area of the brain that responds to pleasurable experiences. The researchers also found that communication between these two areas (the striatum and the anterior insula) was reduced in people with bipolar disorder. “In the control group, the insula and striatum lit up at the same time, suggesting that participants were better able to remember when they perceived a reward,” said Dr. Hestia Moninka of University College London, who was involved in the study. “But participants with bipolar disorder showed the opposite; when there was more motivation, they were less likely to ignore how exciting they found the reward.” The researchers believe that these findings may help explain why people with bipolar disorder can get stuck in a “vicious cycle” where their emotions escalate, sometimes causing them to take more risks than usual. “We believe that these findings could one day help us overcome existing interventions designed to regulate emotions, but which often diminish playful experiences,” Dr. Moninka said. “Instead, we are analyzing new interventions to help people with bipolar disorder better decouple their emotions from their perceptions and decisions,” she added.
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