Interference control commonalities in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder

ABSTRACT

Background: Whereas deficits in executive functioning have been widely reported in schizophrenia and, somewhat less, in bipolar disorder, few studies have addressed this issue in people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Importantly, no studies to date have compared the ability to cope with interfering information in all three groups of patients. Impairment in executive control has been associated with reduced daily functioning. Method: The sample included 20 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, 19 with bipolar disorder, 20 with borderline personality disorder, and 19 demographically matched healthy volunteers. Participants were administered two different experimental tasks to assess the ability to exert control over interference arisen from semantic memory or from distracting perceptual information. Results: The three groups of patients showed similar impairment in solving interference from semantic memory compared to controls. However, no psychiatric group showed impairment in controlling interference from distracting perceptual information relative to controls. Conclusions: Our study shows, for the first time, that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder entail a common impairment in exerting control over interference arisen from memory but intact control over perceptual interference. These findings reinforce the idea that similar cognitive functioning may underlie severe mental disorders sharing poor global functioning but with different patterns of symptomatology.

KEYWORDS:

• Executive functioning
• interference control
• semantic memory
• mental disorders
• distracting information.

ORCID

Carlos J. Gómez-Ariza http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5889-7533

Notes

¹ We also checked for differences between the groups by using the inverse efficiency index, which combines RT and accuracy (RT/accuracy; see, for example, Collignon et al., 2008). The pattern of results was identical to that obtained when only analyzing RT, and no between-group differences emerged.

² A point worth highlighting is that we have used the dichotomy (semantic) memory versus perceptual memory throughout the paper to characterize the nature of interference to be solved. This approach is in line with previous research that has discussed interference control in terms of the processing stage where interference arises (i.e., Nee, Wager, & Jonides, 2007) and is compatible with a dissociation between the ability to withhold a prepotent (internal or external) response and the ability to resist distracting information (Friedman & Miyake, 2004; Nigg, 2000). Hence, we interpret the dissociation observed in our psychiatric sample by virtue of the locus of the interference. From this perspective, patients with SCZ, BD, and BPD seem to have maintained the ability to resist interfering information during encoding (i.e., incompatible condition in the flanker task) but reduced capacity to deal with interference when it arises from retrieving already-encoded information (i.e., interference condition in the HSCT).

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [grant number EDU2008-01111], [grant number PSI2008-05607]; by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [grant number PSI2011-25797 to V.L., J.I.A., and C.J.G.A.; and the Andalusian Government [grant number P08-HUM-3600], [grant number PSI2012-33625 to M.T.B].