Autobiographical memory and problem solving in bipolar disorder

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate the abilities to remember specific past personal events as well as the abilities to generate specific future events in patients with bipolar disorders (BD). Moreover, the study investigated whether the abilities to generate specific events is related to the abilities to solve interpersonal problems which was measured using the Optional Thinking Test (OTT) (Platt & Spivack, 1977). Method: Nineteen patients with bipolar disorders and 17 healthy subjects completed validated French versions (Neumann & Philippot, 2006) of the AMT Williams & Broadbent (1986). Participants were instructed to generate specific past and future memories in response to cues words. For the OTT, they were asked to yield the most solutions as possible to daily problems. Results: For the past events task, the analysis revealed a significant group by memory interaction (F(2,68) = 4.0 ; p=.023) which indicates that the patients with BD recollected less specific events and more overgeneral events than controls. For the future events task, a significant group by memory interaction emerged (F(2,68) = 7.85 ; p<.001) which indicates that the patients with BD were less specific and yielded more overgeneral memories than the control group. Further, the numbers of specific past and future events were correlated to the numbers of solutions to interpersonal problems (r(36) = .57 ; p<.001, r(36) = .43 ; p=.009, respectively). Conclusion: the results are consistent with previous studies that have examined autobiographical memory (AM) specificity in patients with BD (Scott et al., 2000; Mansell & Lam, 2004). These results support the notion of impairments in imagining specific past and future events BD patients. The difficulty in imagining the future may contribute to relapse. Thus, AM remediation program could be an additional useful tool to develop in CBT for bipolar patients.