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A chaque désillusion, il y a avait toujours une «Rétribution». Ma bonne étoile ne m’a jamais quitté, même dans les moments de détresse les plus profonds.
Aberrant salience is likely to be a key mechanism in the development of psychosis. This concept bridges the perceptual and the cognitive level but little is known about their respective roles in the emergence of psychosis. It has also been suggested that not all aspects of aberrant salience are specific to psychosis. The aim of this study was to compare patients with psychosis, patients with other psychiatric diagnoses and healthy, non-clinical participants on several psychological dimensions related to aberrant salience.
A total of 432 French-speaking individuals participated in the study. 282 participants from the general population and 150 persons hospitalized in psychiatric institutions in Switzerland were assessed using the Perceptual Aberration Scale (PAS), the Internal and External Encoding Style Questionnaire (ESQ), the Highly Sensitive Person Scale (HSPS), the Aberrant Salience Inventory (ASI) and the Magical Ideation Scale (MIS).
Three scores (PAS, ESQ & ASI-Sharpening of senses) were able to discriminate between psychiatric patients (both those with psychosis and those with other psychiatric diagnosis) and the general population while three other scores (HSPS, MIS and ASI-Heightened Cognition) discriminated patients with psychosis from both patients with other psychiatric diagnose and non-clinical participants.
The results from the present study suggests that low-level processes (perception) were not specific to psychosis but rather to psychiatric disorders more generally. In contrast, aspects related to cognition, sensitivity, and ideation seems to be specific to psychosis. Future studies should examine whether aspects of cognition, sensitivity, and ideation play a more prominent role in the development of psychosis.
Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) often show alexithymia, but brain mechanisms underlying this emotional disorder remains unknown. We used fMRI to investigate alterations of emotion processing and emotion regulation in patients with MS, and their relationships with alexithymia. Nineteen MS patients with minimal disability and twenty healthy control (HC) participants took part in this cross-sectional study. During fMRI, participants viewed scenes conveying negative or positive emotions, and were asked to rate the intensity of their emotional state 1) after spontaneous viewing and 2) after emotion regulation (cognitive reappraisal). Self-reported questionnaires targeting alexithymia but also other affective disorders were collected, in addition to functional and anatomical MRI. We compared brain activity and functional connectivity between each group during emotion processing and reappraisal. Moreover, we performed correlation analyses between affective questionnaire scores, subjective emotion ratings, brain activity, and structural integrity. Results showed a higher rate of alexithymia in MS patients. Globally, subjective ratings of emotional state were similar between MS and HC during both spontaneous perception and reappraisal. However, in both task conditions, the MS group showed increased responses to emotional scenes in the orbital IFG, relative to controls. Moreover, during the reappraisal of negative scenes, these regions displayed increased functional connectivity with the amygdala, whose activity was positively correlated with alexithymia severity in MS. Our findings suggest a direct relationship between alexithymia and a lack of down-regulation of amygdala activity in response to negative emotions during reappraisal in MS. Moreover, they highlight compensatory mechanisms in minimally disabled MS patients, recruiting fronto-striatal circuits, which may serve to preserve homeostasis of amygdala activity and affective state.
