Mood Pictures - Total Embarrassment
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by emotional dysregulation, "splitting" (or black and white) thinking, and fluctuating and chaotic interpersonal relationships, including pervasive instability in mood, interpersonal relationships, identity, and behavior, as well as a disturbance in the individual's sense of self. They often have severe deficiencies in impulse control, which results in self-destructive behaviors, burst aggression to others. Abnormalities of brain function have been assumed in the areas associated with cognition, affect, emotion regulation, and impulsivity, particularly in the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobe, including the amygdala and/or hippocampus. In accord with this notion, patients with BPD showed enhanced amygdala activation in response to standardized emotionally aversive pictures [130]. Donegan et al [131] reported that BPD patients showed significantly greater left amygdala activation to the facial expressions of emotion compared with healthy subjects, and in post-scan debriefing some patients had difficulty disambiguating neutral faces or found them threatening. Minzenberg and colleagues [132] also confirmed BPD group exhibiting significantly greater activation in the right amygdala to fear minus neutral facial expressions, and a significantly larger magnitude of deactivation on (relative to healthy control) in the bilateral rostral/subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to fear and in the left ACC to fear minus neutral; and they concluded that BPD patients exhibit changes in fronto-limbic activity in the processing of fear stimuli, with exaggerated bilateral amygdala response and impaired emotion-modulation of ACC activity. A FDG-PET study demonstrated a tight coupling of glucose metabolic activity in resting condition between right OFC and ventral amygdala in healthy subjects with dorso-ventral differences in amygdala circuitry, but not present in BPD group, without any significant differences in amygdala volumes or metabolism between BPD patients and controls.
Mood Pictures - Total Embarrassment
The most poignant and moving photographs from Lange's trip convey a mood rather than describing circumstances or activities: the man hunkered at the edge of the field, the mother and child in the tent opening, and the trio of men, one of whom casts a defiant glance at the photographers. The photographs are character studies that render the textures of skin and clothing with an artist's eye and depict posture, gesture, and gaze with an ethnologist's. But their subjects are anonymous and the pictures become genre studies: "the pea picker" or the "jobless man on relief."
Depression is more than the blues or the blahs; it is more than the normal, everyday ups and downs. When that "down" mood, along with other symptoms, lasts for more than a couple of weeks, the condition may be clinical depression. Clinical depression is a serious health problem that affects the total person. In addition to feelings, it can change behavior, physical health and appearance, academic performance, social activity and the ability to handle everyday decisions and pressures. 041b061a72