Warned reaction times of manic-depressive patients with and without lithium.

To assess the performance of manic-depressive patients and normal controls, a warned reaction time task was employed with 20 normal control Ss and 36 manic-depressive outpatients in the free, hypomanic, and depressed states, with and without maintenance levels of lithium carbonate. A warning light appeared at a variable interval preceding a light to which the S responded with a keypress. All Ss received both a regular and an irregular series with warning intervals of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 sec. In the regular series, blocks of intervals followed every other interval equally often. Manic-depressives were uniformly slower than controls in both series at all intervals. Maintenance levels of lithium facilitated reaction times particularly at the longer intervals in the irregular series. Depressive as well as hypomanic states tended to yield faster reaction times than the free state. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)