Emotional-Processing in Borderline Personality Disorder

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The DSM-IV criteria of intense anger and affective instability explicitly underscore emotional-processing abnormalities in BPD, while others (such as frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, repeated suicide attempts or gestures, intense and unstable relationships) may be viewed as strategies to cope with or consequences of this core deficit. Despite the centrality of emotional reactivity to the concept of BPD, surprisingly little research has directly examined emotions in individuals with BPD. An exception is the recent investigation of physiological indicators of emotional reactions to standardized images with pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant emotional valence. In these studies, subjects with BPD did not show more intense responses to any of the stimulus categories, failing to support emotional hyper-responsiveness in BPD. In this proposal, we argue that patients with BPD will show emotional hyper-reactivity after being provoked or triggered by a salient interpersonal challenge. The resultant anger, characterized by high arousal and cognitive and behavioral disinhibition will alter appraisal of emotional cues and interfere with otherwise intact emotional capabilities. The primary aim of this proposal is to conduct the necessary developmental work to examine the emotional-processing consequences of exposure to a personally relevant challenge in BPD. We propose to generate ideographic scripts of recent perceived violation experiences from open-ended semi-structured narrative accounts and examine emotional behavior in the laboratory psychophysiologically (facial EMG, heart rate, and skin conductance response) prior and subsequent to the ideographic challenge. A second aim is to develop sets of emotionally evocative stimuli that are consistent with interpersonal schemas hypothesized to be relevant to BPD, which can be used in future research. A panel of expert BPD clinical researchers will select these sets through a standardized, computer-based sorting procedure. A third aim is to provide a graduate student sufficient knowledge and expertise to conduct independent research in emotional-processing in psychopathology, especially personality disorders. To support these aims, we propose to recruit participants from the ongoing Collaborative Longitudinal Study of Personality Disorders (CLPS) and to examine emotional-processing at the psychophysiological laboratory at the National Center for PTSD in Boston.