Borderline personality disorder and automatic processing of valence and self-other relevance information
Introduction Enhanced sensitivity to emotion stimuli and poor differentiation between self and others have been proposed to be important features of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Automatic processing of affective stimuli provides information about valence (positive vs. negative) and relevan...
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| Published in: | European psychiatry Vol. 33; p. S629 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier Masson SAS
01-03-2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Introduction Enhanced sensitivity to emotion stimuli and poor differentiation between self and others have been proposed to be important features of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Automatic processing of affective stimuli provides information about valence (positive vs. negative) and relevance of valence (self vs. other). Aims The objectives of our study were to investigate efficiency of automatic processing of valence and relevance at a semantic level in BPD compared to healthy individuals. Methods A masked affective priming task, varying valence and relevance of prime and target adjectives, was administered to 33 women with BPD and 33 healthy women. The forward and backward masked primes were shown for 50 ms. Subjects had the task to evaluate target words. Results In the whole sample, a significant affective priming effect and a significant relevance priming effect occurred. Presence of comorbid depressive disorder was positively correlated with extent of affective priming. BPD patients did not differ in affective priming from healthy individuals but they exhibited less relevance priming. Conclusions According to our data efficiency of automatic recognition and processing of valence information at a semantic level is not impaired in BPD compared to healthy individuals. However, BPD patients appear to be less able to perceive and differentiate automatically self- vs. other-relevance during the perception of affective information than healthy controls. The present results indicate that patients with BPD could manifest impairments of self-other differentiation already at a very early or basic stage of emotion processing. |
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| ISSN: | 0924-9338 1778-3585 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.1861 |