Attention and psychomotor functioning in bipolar depression

The objective of this study was to assess psychomotor functioning and attention in individuals with bipolar disorder during the depressed phase of illness. Measures of attention and psychomotor functioning were administered to a sample of 24 bipolar I and II patients and a matched sample of healthy controls. Relative to the healthy controls, the bipolar sample demonstrated evidence of psychomotor slowing and revealed deficits on measures of effortful attention, yet demonstrated comparable performance on measures of automatic attention. In the bipolar sample, we detected significant correlations among measures of psychomotor functioning and some aspects of attention and a strong relationship between the severity of depression and psychomotor functioning, but no direct relationship between attention deficits and depressive symptomatology. These results suggest an attentional impairment during the depressed phase of bipolar disorder that may be specific to effortful processing, while automatic processes remain relatively intact. Associations among indices of attention deficits and psychomotor slowing may be indicative of similarities in the underlying neurobiology of these frequently co-occurring symptom domains in depressed individuals with bipolar disorder.