Background and objectives: Early investigators claimed that temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) was associated with a personality traits and psychiatric symptoms collectively known as the interictal behavioral syndrome or Geschwind's syndrome. Interictal behavioral alterations associated with TLE included affective dysregulation; irritability and impulsive aggression; anxiety and obsessive-compulsive symptoms; paranoia; abnormal patterns of social interaction; schizophrenic-like symptoms and dissociative states; hypergraphia; and hyperreligiosity. A number of psychiatric disorders are known to have subclinical variants. Are recurrent temporolimbic seizure-like events (as determined by a self-report symptom inventory-the LSCL-Limbic System Checklist) among non-clinical subjects also associated with TLE-related psychiatric symptoms/ syndromes and personality features? Methods: To test this, we examined the clinical/personality profiles of students who self-reported symptoms associated with temporolimbic seizures. Results: In two separate studies, we found that American and Turkish students reporting temporolimbic seizure-like symptoms had clinical/personality profiles resembling interictal clinical/personality features. Conclusions: Findings do not imply that high- or median-LSCL scorers are afflicted with an undiagnosed TL seizure disorder. Rather, the temporolimbic personality may be found, albeit in milder form, among individuals free of neurologic disease.
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