Electrodermal activity in bipolar patients during affective elicitation

Bipolar patients are characterized by a pathological unpredictable behavior, resulting in fluctuations between states of depression and episodes of mania or hypomania. In the current clinical practice, the psychiatric diagnosis is made through clinician-administered rating scales and questionnaires, disregarding the potential contribution provided by physiological signs. The aim of this paper is to investigate how changes in the autonomic nervous system activity can be correlated with clinical mood swings. More specifically, a group of ten bipolar patients underwent an emotional elicitation protocol to investigate the autonomic nervous system dynamics, through the electrodermal activity (EDA), among different mood states. In addition, a control group of ten healthy subjects were recruited and underwent the same protocol. Physiological signals were analyzed by applying the deconvolutive method to reconstruct EDA tonic and phasic components, from which several significant features were extracted to quantify the sympathetic activation. Experimental results performed on both the healthy subjects and the bipolar patients supported the hypothesis of a relationship between autonomic dysfunctions and pathological mood states.