Associations between hypomania proneness and attentional bias to happy, but not angry or fearful, faces in emerging adults

ABSTRACT

Mania, the core feature of bipolar disorder, is associated with heightened and positive emotion responding. Yet, little is known about the underlying cognitive processes that may contribute to heightened positive emotionality observed. Additionally, while previous research has investigated positive emotion biases in non-clinical samples, few if any, account for subthreshold clinical symptoms or traits, which have reliably assessed psychopathological risk. The present study compared continuous scores on a widely used self-report measure of hypomania proneness (HPS-48) with a dot-probe task to investigate attentional biases for happy, angry, fearful, and neutral faces among 66 college student participants. Results suggested that hypomania proneness was positively associated with attentional bias towards happy, but not angry or fearful faces. Results remained robust when controlling for positive affect and did not appear to be affected by negative affect or current symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Findings provide insight into potential behavioural markers that co-occur with heightened positive emotional responding and hypomania in emerging adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Mania
• bipolar disorder
• positive emotion
• attention
• emerging adults

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Single t tests against zero revealed significant overall attentional biases for happy (t = −2.13, p = 0.037) and angry (t = 4.90, p < .001) but not for fearful faces (t = 0.92, p = 0.361).

2 Importantly, this pattern was also present when comparing happy bias scores between groups of participants scoring at, or within, the first (scores ≤ 11) and fourth quartiles (scores ≥ 30.25) on the HPS-48, t(31) = −2.15, p = 0.040.

3 There remained no evidence of a difference when comparing anger and fear bias scores between groups of participants scoring at or within the first (scores ≤ 11) and fourth quartiles (scores ≥ 30.25) on the HPS-48 for both anger: t(31) = −0.91, p = .368, and fear: t(31) = −0.48, p = .631.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021) http://www.ccd.edu.au (RP), ARC Discovery Project grant (DP110100850) (RP), a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (JG), a CTSA Grant Number UL1 RR024139 from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) (JG), NIMH T32MH103213 & F31MH122122 (JP), and Indiana CTSI Predoctoral Award Grant UL1TR001108 & TL1TR002531 (JP). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of NIH. PSG is supported by a CNPq researcher fellowship (309905/2019-2) and CAPES - PRINT (Programa Institucional de Internacionalização; Grant 88887.310255/2018–00).