Depersonalization, Emotion, and Memory Fragmentation

It is often said that in patients with depersonalization, when confronted with an emotion, the show inhibition in its processing (Giesbrecht, Merckelbach, van Oorsouw, and Simeon, 2010). In addition it is suggested that this leads to memory fragmentation. in the study of Griesbrecht et al. (2010) it was investigated whether there was an association among the temporal aspects of autonomic responses to cues of emotional content and impairments of subjective as well as objective memory formation. The experiment consisted of viewing a long emotional video part in patients and healthy control subjects. In all participants skin conductance was measured. The results showed that in healthy participants, while watching the emotional video clip they exhibited both peritraumatic as well as anxiety enhancement. Patients with depersonalization disorder were both inferior on the subjective as well as the objective memory task. Maximum amplitude of skinn conductance was more pronounced in patients that were more severely affected (Giesbrecht et al., 2010). Compared to healthy control participants, patients with depersonalization disorder displayed an impairment of higher learning of contextual cues in the emotional task. It is suggested by the authors that the absense of good encodement of contextual stimuli might be the result of their lower performance on the memory fragmentation tasks ( Giesbrecht et al., 2010).