Study: Bipolar patients have heightened responses to pleasure during mood changes.

According to a study, mood swings, even brief ones, may significantly increase the brain's reactivity to pleasure in individuals with bipolar disorder.

Extreme mood and energy swings are a hallmark of this mental illness, which makes its sufferers more vulnerable to what psychologists refer to as "mood bias," which is the tendency for one's positive mood to color everything in a positive light and therefore "gain momentum" in mood.

Imagine your first experience dining at a new restaurant. Co-lead author of the study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science Liam Mason of University College London's Psychology and Language Sciences stated, "If you happen to be in a fantastic mood, you're likely to perceive the experience as being even better than it actually is."

The results may shed light on why bipolar disorder sufferers become caught in a "vicious cycle" where their mood swings become more extreme and occasionally lead them to take greater risks than usual, according to the researchers.

In order to gather data for the study, 21 patients with bipolar disorder and 21 without it had their brains scanned while they played a computerized version of the roulette game. In order to play the game, you have to guess which rotating wheel compartment a small ball will land in.

The researchers monitored the individuals' brain reactions when they won and lost using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanning. Using computer models, they quantified the impact of mood swings on the brain's "reward signals" in a matter of seconds. The anterior insula of the brain, which is involved in mood regulation, showed significant activity in both participant groups during the game, according to the study.

Only those with bipolar disorder, however, demonstrated an increased level of "mood bias" in how they interpreted victories and defeats. The striatum, the area of the brain that reacts to joyful experiences, showed strong activity in the subjects' brain scans, according to the researchers.
The insula and striatum in the control group are both responding in unison, indicating that participants

Co-lead author Hestia Moningka of the Psychology and Language Sciences department at University College London said, "Meanwhile, participants with bipolar disorder showed the opposite; when there was higher momentum, they were less able to set this aside from how exciting they found the rewards to be."

Additionally, the researchers discovered that the bipolar disorder subjects' anterior insula and striatum communicated less effectively. According to Moningka, the results may enable us to go beyond current therapies that try to control mood, frequently at the expense of sapping the excitement out of situations.

Rather, Moningka stated, "We are looking into new interventions that help people with bipolar disorder better decouple their mood from their perception and decisions."