Background: Increasing recognition is being given to the importance of cognitions observed in posttraumatic conditions. These cognitions may reflect the activation of negative schemas. The aim of this work was to evaluate the feasibility of the scrambled-sentences task (SST) to assess individual differences in attributions commonly observed after traumas. Originally developed to assess the tendency to activate negative cognitions in individuals predisposed to depression, the SST is a laboratory task the outcome of which has been shown to predict depression relapse and is associated with depressiveness. Sampling and Methods: We used content from self-rating scales for assessment of the activation of trauma-related schemas to develop a trauma-related SST and evaluated its performance in a behavioral study (n = 43) and a functional neuroimaging study (n = 20). Results: In the healthy sample in which we tested it, the trauma-related SST was strongly associated with individual differences in negative affect (scores in depressiveness and neuroticism scales) as well as with the scores on trauma-related cognition scales. However, we failed to detect a clear specificity of trauma-related cognitions in correlations with scores on the trauma-related scales in the healthy participants. The neuroimaging data demonstrated activation of a ventral network of areas that included the perisylvian/temporal cortex and the peri­cingular cortex in handling trauma-related relative to neutral material, replicating previous neuroimaging studies of the SST. Conclusion: The shattered-assumptions SST demonstrated strong associations with individual differences in all of the rating scales used in the study, suggesting its usefulness in capturing aspects of affective psychopathology. The neuroimaging study confirmed the capacity of this task to elicit specific activations. In future studies, evaluation of the conditions in which these neural substrates are active may shed light on the mechanism of schema selection.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by pronounced emotional instability in interpersonal relations. Previous studies have shown increased activity in the amygdala, an imaging phenotype of negative affect. However, clinical accounts of BPD have drawn attention to deficits in social cognition and their likely role in engendering emotional instability. BPD patients show enhanced sensitivity to other people's emotions, while being less proficient in reading motives and reasons. In the present functional imaging study, we exposed BPD participants to stylized scenes of individuals affected by loss or separation, an issue to which these patients are particularly sensitive. Previously shown to activate the mirror neuron system, these mourning scenes were here also used to assess differential amygdala activity in stimuli of negative valence, but low arousal. Relative to controls, BPD patients were found to activate sensorimotor areas, a part of the mirror neuron system thought to encode basic aspects of the perception of motoric activity and pain. This contrasted with the activity of areas related to more complex aspects of social cognition, such as the inferior frontal gyrus. The amygdala was more active in patients when viewing these scenes, but this effect also showed a strong association with levels of depressiveness and neuroticism. After adjusting for these covariates, differences in amygdala activation were no longer significant. These findings are consistent with models of social cognition in BPD that attribute emotional sensitivity to emotional contagion through the mirror neuron system, in contrast to areas associated with more sophisticated forms of social cognition. These effects were accompanied by increased amygdala reactivity, consistently with the common occurrence of affective symptoms in these patients.

No abstract