Indirect measurement of dysfunctional attitudes in bipolar affective disorder.

OBJECTIVE

The present study uses an indirect measure to explore whether dysfunctional attitudes are characteristic of all phases of bipolar disorder. Previous studies with bipolar patients using indirect measurements have uncovered depression-like responses that were otherwise undetected.

DESIGN

A cross-sectional study design was adopted to explore the presence of dysfunctional attitudes within each phase of the illness.

METHOD

Manic patients, depressed bipolar patients, remitted bipolar patients, and healthy controls were compared on a sentence stem completion task designed to implicitly assess dysfunctional attitudes.

RESULTS

The manic, depressed, and remitted patients all exceeded the controls on implicit measures of dysfunctional attitudes.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that all phases of bipolar disorder are associated with depressogenic dysfunctional attitudes.