Department of Psychology, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Plac Litewski 5, 20-080 Lublin, Poland.
Percept Mot Skills. 2013 Aug;117(1):1346-60. doi: 10.2466/03.10.pms.117x15z8.
The purpose was to test whether specific characteristics of handwriting can distinguish patients diagnosed with major depression from healthy controls and patients with bipolar disorder. Handwriting samples from 30 patients with major depressive disorder and 30 patients in the bipolar depressive phase were compared to samples from 30 patients in the bipolar manic phase and 60 healthy controls. Forensic document experts examined all 150 written samples of the same text and empirically measured graphical aspects potentially related to depression, such as direction of the baseline, pen pressure, tremor, forms of the letters 'm', 'n', 'a', and 'o', sizes of the letters and writing zones, the initial and final shapes of letters, slant, and impulse. Three handwriting parameters of 32 examined differed significantly between controls and patients with depression (major depression or depressed bipolar patients). However, there were no statistically significant differences in these parameters between depressed patients and bipolar patients in the manic phase, indicating that these handwriting characteristics cannot distinguish depressed patients from manic patients. The main hypothesis, that psychomotor slowing is visible in handwriting, was not confirmed.
目的是测试手写的特定特征是否可以区分被诊断为重度抑郁症的患者与健康对照组和双相情感障碍患者。将 30 名重度抑郁症患者和 30 名双相情感障碍抑郁期患者的手写样本与 30 名双相情感障碍躁狂期患者和 60 名健康对照组的样本进行比较。法医文件专家检查了所有 150 份相同文本的书写样本，并对可能与抑郁相关的图形方面进行了实证测量，例如基线方向、笔压、震颤、字母“m”、“n”、“a”和“o”的形状、字母和书写区域的大小、字母的初始和最终形状、倾斜度和冲动。在对照组和抑郁患者（重度抑郁症或抑郁发作的双相情感障碍患者）之间，有 32 个检查的手写参数存在显著差异。然而，在躁狂期的抑郁患者和双相情感障碍患者之间，这些参数没有统计学上的显著差异，表明这些手写特征无法区分抑郁患者和躁狂患者。主要假设，即运动性迟缓在手写中可见，未得到证实。
