Granger, Shara (2015) Depression-Avoidance Defences in Bipolar-Euthymia. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

Contemporary accounts of the manic defence hypothesis propose that underlying mania are activated negative schemas that are psychically defended against. Indeed, research which has investigated the cognitive processes of bipolar-manic individuals has found that despite reporting high levels of perceived self-worth on explicit measures that assess consciously known cognitive processes, when assessed with implicit measures that assess subconscious processes, bipolar-manic individuals exhibit activated negative schemas of low self-worth comparable to bipolar-depressed individuals. These findings have lead researchers to propose that explicit measures of cognitive processes are confounded by defensive responding in bipolar-manic individuals. Despite considerable inconsistencies being found in relation to the activated negative schemas of bipolar-euthymic individuals when assessed with explicit measures, to date, no study has investigated whether bipolar-euthymia is too characterised by defensive responding. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether bipolar-euthymic individuals respond defensively on explicit measures of negative schemas that were specifically designed to operationalise and assess negative schema content (the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale - DAS and the Young Schema Questionnaire – YSQ), and to investigate whether, as proposed with bipolar-mania, bipolar-euthymia is characterised by depression-avoidance defences.

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