Reward and Punishment Sensitivity in Bipolar Disorders

Bipolar disorder (BD) represents a chronic mood disorder and one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Complexity of its clinical presentations leads to delayed diagnosis and difficult management in routine clinical settings. Whereas distinguishing BD-I and BD-II main subtypes has a significant relevance for treatment strategy and for outcome, there are currently no clinical determinants of the BD subtype which could be used as early diagnostic predictors.

• While neurobiological specificity of each BD subtype is still controversial, available evidence suggest different dopaminergic abnormalities in each subtype. Dopaminergic function is involved in decision making and reward processing which may represent useful BD subtype markers.
• This study aims at assessing decision making during appetitive and punitive reinforcement learning in patients with BD I and BD II subtypes compared to healthy controls