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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychopathology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1476345
This article is part of the Research Topic From Childhood to Adulthood: Exploring the Role of Early Maladaptive Schemas in Child Development and Psychopathology View all 5 articles
Early Maladaptive Schemas subgroups in remitted bipolar disorders
Provisionally accepted
Katia M'Bailara 1,2*
Caroline Munuera 1 François Weil 2,3
Christine Passerieux 2,3,4
Paul Roux 2,3,4,5- 1 Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
- 2 Fondation FondaMental, Hôpital Albert Chenevier, Créteil, France
- 3 Centre Hospitalier de Versailles, Le Chesnay, France
- 4 Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Versailles, Île-de-France, France
- 5 Université Paris-Saclay, Saint Aubin, France
Objectives : To better understand the disability and heterogeneity in terms of residual symptoms and psychosocial and cognitive functioning in bipolar disorders (BD), individual discrepancies in the activation of early maladaptive schemas (EMS) are relevant to investigate.This study aimed to identify activation profiles of EMS and to investigate the association between identified profiles and disability during euthymia.Design: This is a cross-sectional study.Methods: Clinical data, psychosocial functioning, neuropsychological performance and EMS were collected in euthymic outpatients with a BD. Clustering was performed on EMS activation, followed by inter-cluster comparisons on variables above using post-hoc tests. A multivariate regression was used to confirm associations between clusters and variables of interest by controlling for covariates.Results: Thanks to a person-oriented approach, our results showed three profiles of EMS: "Hypoactivation", "Light activation". and "Major Hyperactivation". Individuals in the light and major hyper activated clusters had worse psychosocial functioning compared to individuals in the hypoactivated cluster. There were no differences in neuropsychological performance between the different profiles of EMS, thus suggesting the independence of these sources of variance in psychosocial functioning of individuals with BD.Conclusions: This paper highlights the importance of considering individual personality and functioning to better understand the heterogeneity in BD during euthymia. For some people, schema therapy seems particularly relevant due to the overactivation of EMS, and even more so because these people have particularly marked functional impairments and clinical severity.
Keywords: bipolar disorders, Euthymia, Early maladaptive schemas (EMS), psychosocial functioning, residual symptoms, Neuropsychological performance, clustering
Received: 05 Aug 2024; Accepted: 25 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 M'Bailara, Munuera, Weil, Passerieux and Roux. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Katia M'Bailara, Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
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