Neuropsychological Characteristics of Highly Dissociative Healthy Individuals

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Dissociative disorders are characterized by disturbances in several neuropsychological domains, especially attention, memory, and consciousness. As a tendency to dissociate can also be observed in healthy individuals, and may be a risk factor for the development of dissociative disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we were interested in the neuropsychological characteristics of these participants. METHOD: We examined attention, memory, and executive control functions in 17 high and 17 low dissociators without any psychiatric or neurological disorder and without prior experiences of trauma. RESULTS: High dissociators showed relative performance deficiencies in tasks of memory for associative, context-dependent verbal material, visuospatial working memory, and executive control functions in terms of a heightened perseveration tendency and false positive errors. CONCLUSION: These cognitive deficits are consistent with models of dissociative disorders and dissociation in PTSD assuming a hippocampal and prefrontal dysfunction as a core factor. Mild cognitive impairments in otherwise healthy high dissociators may constitute a risk factor for the development of later PTSD or dissociative disorders.