WHICH COGNITIVE PROCESSES UNDERLIE THE DISINHIBITED ORGANIC PERSONALITY DISORDER?

Abstract

The review of the behavioural disinhibition disorder in neuropsychology reveals clinical descriptions with poorly defined adjectives and descriptive rather than explanatory approaches. This is the usual approach in psychiatry and neuropsychiatry. However, neuropsychological research requires more than lists of behaviours to go deeply into the nature of this disorder. This idea suggests that the study of the underlying processes must be tackled in these behavioural disorder, even if the gap between overt behaviour and underlying mechanism is as large as in executive functions. The aim of the present article is to review the knowledge on the so called behavioural disinhibition disorder, including descriptive aspects as well as explanatory models on the topic. In scientific literature there doesn’t seem to exist any theoretical proposal which accounts, on its own, for the variety and complexity of the disinhibited behaviours. In that respect, it doesn’t seem adequate enough referring to “frontal behaviours”, “impulsivity”, “failure in inhibition”, etc. because these terms may be referring to behaviours quite different in its aetiology or in its characteristics.