Grant: Operating Grant

Increasing understanding of the specific cognitive impairments that affect patients with bipolar disorder is critical as these difficulties are likely to identify patients who show poorer everyday functioning and quality of life. Knowledge of these core cognitive deficits can also facilitate development of treatments that improve these specific impairments as well as overall patient functioning and quality of life. To date, research in bipolar disorder has determined that many patients show difficulties in traditional cognitive abilities such as attention, memory, and executive functioning. One thing that all these skills have in common is that they evaluate how well an individual is able to process external information about the world (e.g. words, stories, pictures, etc.). In contrast, the field of metacognition involves the study of a person's ability to reflect on their internal world, namely their own thinking skills. Thus, whereas traditional skills measure a person's performance on a task, metacognitive tasks measure a person's ability to evaluate their own cognitive skills and performance. Despite the fact that metacognitive deficits are strongly implicated in bipolar disorder, such methodologies have not been integrated into bipolar research. The goal of the present research is to investigate whether patients with bipolar disorder show abnormalities in metacognition characterized by poor awareness of their own cognitive performance. A secondary goal is to assess whether these metacognitive abnormalities predict poorer everyday function and quality of life in patients. Finding such a connection would be important because it would 1) alert clinicians to assess an important symptom in patients with bipolar disorder, and 2) provide new direction for development of novel treatments that target the metacognitive abnormalities and also improve daily functioning and patient quality of life.