Emotion Processing in Borderline Personality Disorders

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the ways in which adults with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience and manage their feelings. Responses of 30 subjects who met the criteria for BPD on the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R were compared with 40 non-BPD controls on the following measures of emotion processing and affect regulation: 1) level of emotional awareness, 2) capacity to coordinate mixed valence feelings, 3) accuracy at identifying facial expressions of emotion, and 4) intensity of response to negative emotions. The results showed significant differences between the two groups on all measures. The borderlines showed significantly lower levels of emotional awareness, less capacity to coordinate mixed valence feelings, lower accuracy at recognizing facial expressions of emotion, and more intense responses to negative emotions than the nonborderline controls. The findings corroborate clinical observations of borderline patients' difficulties in regulating emotions. The implications of the results for the therapeutic management of BPD patients are discussed.

Emotion Recognition in Borderline Personality Disorder—A Review of the Literature

“…In the first published study, Levine and coworkers presented expressions of basic emotions from the "Pictures of Facial Affect" (Eckman & Friesen, 1976) and found that borderline patients were less accurate in terms of emotion recognition, especially for expressions of anger, disgust, and fear (Levine, Marziali, & Hood, 1997). This result was replicated and extended by Bland, Williams, Scharer, and Manning (2004), who found in their study that recognition accuracy was impaired for fearful, angry, and sad faces.…”

Emotion regulation as mediator of treatment outcome in therapy for deliberate self‐harm

“…First, descriptive studies consistently show that compared with psychiatric and non-psychiatric control participants, DSH patients (often diagnosed with borderline personality disorder) score signifi cantly higher on self-report measures tapping emotion regulation diffi culties, including lower emotional awareness and clarity (Leible & Snell, 2004;Levine, Marziali,…”

Dysfunctions of Facial Emotion Recognition in Adult Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Influence on interpersonal difficulties

“…Here again, the literature provides contradictory results: good EFE perception was found in one study (Wagner & Linehan, 1999) and accuracy problems in another (Levine, Marziali, & Hood, 1997). These discrepancies might be due to a difficulty to isolate borderline patients without co-morbidities like depression or substance abuse.…”