Sleep disturbance and attention bias in hypomanic personality

Abstract

Individuals high in hypomanic personality are “energetic, upbeat, gregarious people who are often able to work long hours with little sleep and who juggle numerous projects and social commitments” (p.214, Eckblad & Chapman, 1986). They exhibited a “mild manic state” as baseline personality characteristic, which put them at risk for developing bipolar disorder (BD). Despite the substantial heritability of BD, up to 90% of individuals with the disorder did not have first-degree relates with the diagnosis. Therefore, apart from genetic vulnerability, there is an increased need to understand other risk factors for BD. To this end, the current study aimed to explore the underlying attention processing and sleep mechanisms among those with high hypomanic personality traits. Seventy-seven undergraduate university students with no lifetime psychiatric diagnosis completed a computerized emotional dot-probe task, an online questionnaire, and wore an actigraphy for 7 consecutive days; hypomanic personality was assessed using Eckblad and Chapman’s (1986) Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS).