Abstract
Background The present study investigated how emotional valence influenced the working memory of patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) as compared to healthy individuals. Methods Emotional-N-Back task (E-N-back task) was administered to 15 PNES patients and equal number of healthy individuals. A 23 one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used. Correct detection (accuracy) and reaction (RT) time were recorded as behavioral performance measures. Results The ANOVA result of correct detection (accuracy) measure revealed significant difference in the performance of patients with PNES as compared with healthy individual, F (2, 48)=17.08, p =0.001. However, on the measure of reaction time (RT), both groups performed equally and there was no significant difference, F (2, 48)=1.13, p =0.33. Also the results of present study showed that patients with PNES are quicker in identifying unpleasant picture stimuli, which is evident from their mean comparison: unpleasant ( M =65.55, SD =15.66), pleasant ( M =58.22, SD =20.03), and neutral ( M =45.11, SD =23.13). Conclusion Conclusively, the finding of the present study shows a significant effect of emotional valence on working memory of patients with PNES on the measure of correct detection (accuracy), but not for second measure, i.e., reaction time this clearly reveals that patients with PNES are poor at emotionalcognitive integration, specifically at working memory level.
Copyright
Association for Helping Neurosurgical Sick People. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Derivative-Non Commercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit.
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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License, which permits unrestricted reproduction and distribution, for non-commercial purposes only; and use and reproduction, but not distribution, of adapted material for non-commercial purposes only, provided the original work is properly cited.
