No abstract

Although normal personality traits change gradually with age, personality disorders have been reported to remit rapidly and completely in little more than 10 years. Such a benign prognosis is surprising and may be due in part to the combined use of categorical diagnoses, seriously ill patients, and longitudinal designs in the existing literature. This study examines, for the first time, the development of personality pathology across a life span by means of dimensional models, represented by the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology-Basic Questionnaire and the Personality Inventory for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. We draw upon a cross-sectional design and four large clinical and community samples to avoid previous biases. We found that personality pathology declined by around 0.5 SD overall from age 20 to 60, though with noticeable differences between domains: Dissocial behavior and antagonism decreased by between two thirds and 1 SD; compulsivity increased at the same rate; disinhibition, negative affect, and psychoticism dropped by 0.5 SD;

This study was designed to examine selective processing of emotional information in depression. It focuses on possible attentional biases in depression, and whether such biases constitute a cognitive vulnerability factor to suffer from the disorder or, on the contrary, they reflect a feature associated exclusively with the clinical level of depression. 81 participants were included in the study: 15 with a diagnosis of Major Depression; 17 were diagnosed as Dysthymia; 11 participants scored over 18 in the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979); 15 participants, in whom a sad mood state was induced by an experimental mood induction (Velten technique + music, or biographical recall + music); and 23 participants as a normal-control group. All participants were presented with the emotional Stroop task. The data indicated that attentional bias was only present in the group of patients with Major Depression, so it does not seem to be a cognitive vulnerability factor for this disorder.

Current dimensional taxonomies of personality disorder show a stronger empirical grounding than categories, but may lack the necessary level of detail to make accurate predictions and case formulations. We need to further develop the lower levels of the hierarchy until reaching the building blocks of personality pathology. The Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology-Basic Questionnaire (DAPP-BQ) is well-suited to this purpose due to its multilayered structure and its agreement with the official dimensional classifications. We disaggregated the 18 DAPP-BQ mid-level facets through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis in a sample of 3233 community subjects and outpatients. We obtained a set of 72 clinically relevant, narrower subfacets, which were reliable, well-fitted to the data, and invariant between clinical and community subjects and between the sexes. This third level of Fernando Gutiérrez and Enrique Vicente contributed equally to this study.

Introducción. En los últimos años, la neurociencia ha experimentado un creciente interés por aplicar sus métodos al conocimiento de los trastornos psiquiátricos, y una de las herramientas fundamentales para ello son las técnicas de neuroimagen. No obstante, en general, los estudios de aplicación de la resonancia magnética funcional en este ámbito son escasos y, en ocasiones, contradictorios.Objetivo. En este trabajo se revisa la bibliografía especializada y se describe, de forma crítica, la literatura científica existente hasta la actualidad sobre la aplicación de resonancia magnética funcional y de tensor de difusión a uno de los trastornos más estudiados desde un punto de vista neurobiológico, como es el trastorno obsesivo-compulsivo.Desarrollo. Se revisan los artículos sobre la utilización de la resonancia magnética funcional, así como aquéllos que han investigado la conectividad neural, indexados en las bases de datos médicas más utilizadas sobre el tema desde 1996.Conclusión. La mayoría de estudios sugiere que el córtex prefrontal (orbitofrontal y cíngulo), los ganglios basales y el tálamo están relacionados con la patogénesis del trastorno obsesivo-compulsivo. Asimismo, se constatan alteraciones en la sustancia blanca que afectan a la conectividad neural. Las aportaciones de la neuroimagen en general, y de la resonancia magnética funcional en particular, son y serán, sin duda, una herramienta de especial interés para aclarar la etiología de este trastorno.