The Mental Simulation of Motor Incapacity in Depression (original) (raw)
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Motor Imagery in Unipolar Major Depression
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2014
Background: Motor imagery is a potential tool to investigate action representation, as it can provide insights into the processes of action planning and preparation. Recent studies suggest that depressed patients present specific impairment in mental rotation. The present study was designed to investigate the influence of unipolar depression on motor imagery ability.
Motor Resonance Mechanisms during Action Imitation in Depression
Neuropsychiatry
Major depressive disorder has been associated with impairments in social cognition. However, studies exploring the processing of social information focused on facial discrimination. The aim of this study was to better characterize the sensorimotor mechanisms underlying motor resonance in depressed patients. Method Twenty-three right-handed patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for unipolar depression were compared to 14 matched healthy controls. In a simple imitation paradigm, the kinematic features of movements in natural condition were compared to those of motions performed after the observation of a moving dot. Reaction time and pointing velocity were considered to evaluate if the motor performance was contaminated by the observed stimulus. Results Patient's velocity varied in agreement with dot velocity, proving that they were able to extract the correct information from the stimuli and use it to plan their responses. Depressed patients' actions, as well as healthy controls, were influenced by the dot velocity, suggesting that motor resonance mechanisms are not prevented by depression. In contrast, only patients had anticipatory motor response and started moving before the end of the stimulus motion. Conclusion Our findings suggest that motor resonance mechanisms are not altered by the disease. However, depressed patients exhibit a specific deficit in motor inhibition in the selection of motor responses.
Reliance on external cues during serial sequential movement in major depression
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 2000
Maintenance of motor set in patients with unipolar major depression was examined. Twelve melancholic and 12 nonmelancholic depressed patients and 24 age matched controls performed a serial choice reaction time task while external cues aiding maintenance of a motor set were systematically removed. Melancholic patients were significantly slower than controls with no reduction in external cues and with a moderate reduction in external cues. At a high level of reduction in external cues, seven of 12 melancholic patients (but only three of 12 nonmelancholic patients and controls) were unable to complete the task; suggesting a greater reliance on external cues, perhaps implicating a failure of motor planning ability in melancholic patients. This, in turn, may point to a prefrontal (premotor) deficit in melancholic depression, with possible commonalities with Parkinson's disease. (J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2000;69:237-239)
Journal of Evidence-Based Psychotherapies
The high rate of recurrence and residual symptoms of depression continuously motivate the search for new treatments addressing this challenging condition. In this single-case study, we reported the application of a cognitive rehabilitation skills training based on remote kinematics as a treatment for residual depression by targeting deficits of mental simulations of action. We found that the administration of Kinect-based rehabilitation training resulted in important improvements showed by significant mean baseline reductions (MBLR) of difficulty in imagining positive actions (MBLR= 54 %), negative emotions (MBLR = 36.3 %), cognitive flexibility (MBLR= 69.7 %), depressive symptoms (MBLR= 80%), and physical retardation (MBLR= 50 %). Similarly, improvements in positive affect (MBLR = 107 %) and vividness of motor imagery for positive actions were registered (MBLR= 100 %). We also found unique effects of our intervention such as reports of involuntary action simulations to distant stim...
Control and Learning Motor in Depression From The Relationship Physiotherapy-Mental Health
Introduction: The mental health as field of action for the physiotherapists is an important challenge that implies formation and investigation. The alterations of the mental health on a global scale are nowadays a problem of public health that it makes necessary that the professionals of the area of the health have a deeper knowledge on the topic to act of way adapted from the prevention and intervention. The control and learning motor are theoretical modality of the neurorehabilitación that allow to analyze the body and the movement beyond the biological dimension. The main mental alterations affect the system límbico entrusted of learning, the emotions and the memory; it has a big relation with the autonomous system and different components of the central and peripheral nervous system, what justifies that the physical therapy in neurorrehabilitación must understand in a suitable way the mental health. A bibliographical review was presented that allowed to interpret the motor control and learning in the depression from the relationship of physiotherapy and mental health.
Disturbances of Embodiment as Core Phenomena of Depression in Clinical Practice
This paper proposes a phenomenological approach to the diagnosis of depression, with the aim of overcoming the broadness and nonspecificity of the concept of major depressive disorder (MDD) in current systems of diagnostic classification of mental disorders. Firstly, we outline the methodological limitations of the current classification systems for the diagnosis of MDD. Secondly, we offer a conceptual differentiation between a "symptomatological" versus a "phenomenological" diagnosis of depression. Thirdly, we propose characteristic "disturbances of embodiment" as the fundamental phenomena of "core depression", which manifest themselves in 3 dimensions: embodied self, embodied intentionality, and embodied time. A more useful diagnosis of depression may be achieved by describing the phenomena that constitute a core depression, in order to avoid the overdiagnosis of MDD and its negative consequences in clinical practice.
Helplessness in depression: the unbearable riddle of the other
2007
From early on in his thinking, Sigmund Freud was attentive to the issue of helplessness in psychic functioning. Whereas Freud linked helplessness primarily to the affect of anxiety, later theoreticians like Edward Bibring conceptualized it as linked to depressive affects. The idea that helplessness is connected to depression is now well established in both psychiatry and psychology. Within a contemporary clinical psychoanalytic perspective, too, helplessness continues to be an important topic. The framework in psychiatry and psychology within which helplessness is most often studied is the learned helplessness paradigm. Based on laboratory experiments with animals in the 1960s and I 970s, Seligman (1972) observed that animals experiencing inescapable events such as electric shocks, which no actions can control, develop dramatic symptoms of helplessness (e.g., passivity and despair). This phenomenon of "learned helplessness" has since then served as a para-digmatic model fo...