Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) display severe difficulties in interpersonal relationships and impulse control. We explored the possibility that patients with BPD show less trust and more risk-taking behavior in experimental games as compared with controls and with depressed patients with other personality disorders. In the trust game, the participant played the role of an investor who interacted with a trustee via the Internet. The investor could choose a costly action by giving money units (MU) to the trustee. The trustee then could honor the investor's trust by sharing the monetary increase. In the risk game, the investor could transfer money to a lottery, and therefore the payoff depended on luck and not on the decision of another person. Results revealed that the patients with BPD (n = 25) transferred a smaller amount of MUs across 5 consecutive transactions in the trust game as compared with the controls (n = 25) and with the depressed patients (n = 25). In the risk game, the performance of the BPD patients was similar to that of the controls and depressed patients. Trust game performance was predicted by the interpersonal and cognitive sector scores of the Zanarini Rating Scale for Borderline Personality Disorder. Self reports indicated that the patients with BPD were less optimistic regarding the outcome (payoff) of the trust game, but not of the risk game. These results suggest that patients with BPD exhibit less trust during interpersonal interactions, which may be related to stress-related paranoia, dissociation, identity disturbance, and problems in interpersonal relationships.

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Gender identity disorder (GID) refers to transsexual individuals who feel that their assigned biological gender is incongruent with their gender identity and this cannot be explained by any physical intersex condition. There is growing scientific interest in the last decades in studying the neuroanatomy and brain functions of transsexual individuals to better understand both the neuroanatomical features of transsexualism and the background of gender identity. So far, results are inconclusive but in general, transsexualism has been associated with a distinct neuroanatomical pattern. Studies mainly focused on male to female (MTF) transsexuals and there is scarcity of data acquired on female to male (FTM) transsexuals. Thus, our aim was to analyze structural MRI data with voxel based morphometry (VBM) obtained from both FTM and MTF transsexuals (n = 17) and compare them to the data of 18 age matched healthy control subjects (both males and females). We found differences in the regional grey matter (GM) structure of transsexual compared with control subjects, independent from their biological gender, in the cerebellum, the left angular gyrus and in the left inferior parietal lobule. Additionally, our findings showed that in several brain areas, regarding their GM volume, transsexual subjects did not differ significantly from controls sharing their gender identity but were different from those sharing their biological gender (areas in the left and right precentral gyri, the left postcentral gyrus, the left posterior cingulate, precuneus and calcarinus, the right cuneus, the right fusiform, lingual, middle and inferior occipital, and inferior temporal gyri). These results support the notion that structural brain differences exist between transsexual and healthy control subjects and that majority of these structural differences are dependent on the biological gender.

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