Psychophysiology and Emotion Regulation in BPD

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed research tests Linehan's (1993) theory that Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a disorder of pervasive emotion dysregulation. Linehan defines emotion dysregulation as high sensitivity and intense responding to emotional stimuli across various contexts. In this study, physiological measures of respiratory sinus arrhvthmia (RSA), skin conductance (SC), and self-report will be used to investigate if BPD individuals show indications of pervasive emotion dysregulation by exhibiting heightened emotional responses across multiple emotions and multiple contexts. Participants will engage m a personally-relevant audiotape task (context 1) in which they will hear a description of a time when they felt afraid, angry, sad, and no emotion, and a standardized task (context 2) where they view standardized fear, anger, sad, and neutral films. It is predicted that, at baseline, BPD and GAD patients will show indications of emotional sensitivity compared with normal controls. When exposed to the personally-relevant and standardized fear inductions, it is predicted that the BPD and GAD groups will exhibit increased emotional responding compared to normal controls. However, when exposed to the personally-relevant and standardized anger and sadness inductions, it is expected that the BPD group will exhibit higher emotional responding than both GAD and normal control groups, thus indicating evidence of pervasive emotion dysregulation This study is the first to study emotion dysregulation in BPD using both sympathetic and parasympathic (i.e., vagal tone) physiological measures in addition to self-report.