Enhanced memory for negative social information in borderline personality disorder.

Abstract

Biased social cognition towards an enhanced processing of negative social information might contribute to instability in interpersonal relationships. Such interpersonal dysfunctions are important for the understanding of several mental disorders, among them borderline personality disorder (BPD). To experimentally test enhanced memory retrieval of negative social information, using a newly developed variant of a looking-at-nothing paradigm, 45 BPD patients and 36 healthy women learned positive and negative personality traits of different target persons. In a translational memory test, participants were asked to use the learned information to evaluate statements about the target person. In addition to behavioral measures of memory performance, we investigated eye gaze patterns to decompose memory retrieval processes. We hypothesized that BPD patients would retrieve negative as compared to positive person information more accurately than healthy controls, and show increased eye gaze towards spatial locations where negative information was provided during the learning phase. Results pointed to a more accurate retrieval of negative person attributes in the patient group as compared with healthy controls (HC), thereby corroborating a negativity bias in social cognition in an exemplary sample of patients with interpersonal problems. Interestingly, the observed negativity bias for person memory was associated with BPD severity, stronger expectancies to be rejected by others, and social detachment. No group differences regarding eye fixation behaviour were found. We propose that enhanced retrieval of negative person information might be associated with dysfunctional cognitive schemas as well as reduced behavioral trust, and be of relevance for mental disorders characterized by interpersonal difficulties.

Fear of positive evaluation in borderline personality disorder

“…Researchers try to understand the nature of these strong social impairments to improve psychological interventions for BPD. There is extensive research showing that social impairments in BPD are associated with a negativity bias, which means that individuals with BPD process social information in a negative manner [3][4][5][6][7].…”

Narrative identity characteristics and personality pathology: An exploration of associations from a dimensional and categorical perspective in a clinical sample of youth.

“…Concerning the narrative identity characteristic of autobiographical reasoning , we found that youth who make more negative self-event connections had higher scores on the borderline-, avoidant-, and schizotypal personality profiles. Both these results of affective themes and autobiographical reasoning may reflect the negativity bias and enhanced memory for negative information that is often found in youth with personality pathology, particularly BPD (Carlson & Oltmanns, 2015; Niedtfeld et al, 2020). With regard to motivational themes , it appeared that—in line with previous findings—youth with an avoidant personality trait facet profile narrated less communal and less agentic stories, youth with a schizotypal personality trait facet profile less communal stories and youth with a borderline profile less agentic stories (Cowan et al, 2021; Holm et al, 2018; See et al, 2021).…”

Measuring Dysfunctional Interpersonal Beliefs: Validation of the Interpersonal Cognitive Distortions Scale among a German-speaking Sample

“…In line with this notion, numerous findings from general, clinical and social psychology suggests that DIBs play an important role in aberrant anticipation (e.g., Davidson et al, 2000), attention (Kraines et al, 2018), perception (e.g., Niels Christensen et al, 2003), memorization (e.g., Niedtfeld et al, 2020), and interpretation of social stimuli, (e.g., Elwood et al, 2007) as well as in distorted social behavior (e.g., Evraire & Dozois, 2014). Thus, they constitute a transdiagnostic risk marker for psychopathology (Cicchetti & Doyle, 2016;Mikulincer & Shaver, 2012).…”