Neuropsychological Characteristics of Highly Dissociative Healthy Individuals

ABSTRACT

Objective: Dissociative disorders are characterized by disturbances in several neuropsychological domains, especially attention, memory, and consciousness. As a tendency to dissociate can also be observed in healthy individuals, and may be a risk factor for the development of dissociative disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we were interested in the neuropsychological characteristics of these participants.

Method: We examined attention, memory, and executive control functions in 17 high and 17 low dissociators without any psychiatric or neurological disorder and without prior experiences of trauma.

Results: High dissociators showed relative performance deficiencies in tasks of memory for associative, context-dependent verbal material, visuospatial working memory, and executive control functions in terms of a heightened perseveration tendency and false positive errors.

Conclusion: These cognitive deficits are consistent with models of dissociative disorders and dissociation in PTSD assuming a hippocampal and prefrontal dysfunction as a core factor. Mild cognitive impairments in otherwise healthy high dissociators may constitute a risk factor for the development of later PTSD or dissociative disorders.

KEYWORDS:

• High dissociators
• neuropsychology
• dissociative disorders
• PTSD

Dr. Christine Amrhein was supported by a postdoctoral grant from the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (Germany). The authors thank Rolf Engel for his valuable statistic advice and his support in conducting the study.