The causal role of mood in confabulation

Williams, Cara

The causal role of mood in confabulation

Thesis / Dissertation

2003

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Psychology

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

Following a presumed haemorrhage in the hypothalamic area during an operation to remove a tumour from the diencephalon and frontal lobes, a man (CA) presented with confabulatory amnesia. Previous research papers have shown that confabulations (CA 's included) have a positive emotional bias and Turnbull et al (in press) have demonstrated that low mood appears to co-occur with confabulation. This paper explores the mood of CA across time. The first 155 confabulated statements and (on average) the first 2 non-confabulating statements before and after each confabulation, were extracted from audiotaped and transcribed interviews conducted by a neuropsychologist. The transcribed interviews, with the identified confabulations and non-confabulating statements, were listed in a scaled questionnaire. Four blind raters coded the mood of CA before, during and following each confabulation. The raters were unaware of which statements were confabulations and which were not. Intraclass correlations o/0.84, 0.80 and 0.83 were established between the raters/or the ratings of CA 's mood under the three categories. The rating of CA 's mood was found to significantly differ as a function of the temporal category: before, during or after confabulation ( xJ = 6.5, p<0.05). On average, CA 's mood was rated as being at its lowest before he confabulated and at its highest following the confabulations. This suggests that low mood may play a causal role in the production of confabulations, and/or that confabulation improves mood.