Depersonilization Disorder, Emotion

Michal, Koechel, Canterino, Adler, Reiner, Vossel et al. (2013) investigated autonomic responses for emotional stimuli as well as its cognitive evaluations in patients with depersonalization disorder. Depersonalization disorder can be charachterized by the experience that things are unreal, but with a normal reality testing. Emotional stimuli consisted of sounds with an endurance of six seconds. Skin conductance level was assessed while processing. It was found that early emotion proccessing was unimpaired in these patients. However patients with depersonalization disorder did respond more strong to emotions. It was further argued that cognitive evaluation has been disconnected from bodily autonomic responses, because these patients showed a different scenario to negative auditory presented stimuli in the way that they made negative ones more neutral.