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.