SELECTIVE AFFECTIVE BIASING IN RECOGNITION MEMORY IN THE IRRITABLE-BOWEL-SYNDROME

The cognitive model of depression assigns a central role to negatively biased information processing in the pathogenesis of the emotional di sorder. The relationship between depression and irritable bowel syndro me (IBS) was explored from a cognitive perspective. A word recognition memory task was constructed: subjects had to memorise and subsequentl y recognise a set of emotionally loaded stimulus words with either pos itive, neutral, or negative connotations. Four age matched groups part icipated - 30 IBS patients, 28 depressed patients, 28 patients with or ganic gastrointestinal disease, and 30 healthy volunteers. The depress ed patients, as would be expected, showed a significant bias in favour of emotionally negative words (p<0.05): the IBS patients showed the s ame negative bias. In addition the IBS patients made significantly mor e false-positive type errors in recognising emotionally negative words than either the depressed patients (p<0.05) or the healthy volunteers (p<0.01). This suggests that the IBS patients have a peculiar confirm atory bias for negative material. This may have clinical relevance in terms of the IBS patients' evaluation of their own abdominal sensory e xperience.