Department of Educational Sciences and Psychology Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. lars.schulze @ fu-berlin.de
Psychopathology. 2013;46(4):217-24. doi: 10.1159/000341730. Epub 2012 Sep 20.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is commonly proposed to be characterized by an enhanced sensitivity for emotional stimuli. In the present study, we investigated whether BPD patients show a superior detection of emotional facial expressions relative to healthy controls. The detection of emotional information in the environment represents an important facet of emotional sensitivity.
Twenty patients with BPD were compared with 25 healthy controls. The participants were presented a rapid, continuous stream of neutral and randomly inserted emotional facial expressions and were asked to report the presentation of an emotional facial stimulus after each trial. Availability of cognitive resources was manipulated via two different task demands.
The participants with BPD performed significantly better in the detection of positive and negative facial expressions compared to the healthy controls. False alarm rates did not differ significantly between the two groups.
The BPD participants showed an enhanced detection of emotional expressions that might be related to the emotional disturbances they experience. In particular, we will discuss the role of this superior emotion detection (in combination with previously reported deficits in the labeling of emotional states) for the understanding of emotional instability in BPD.
边缘型人格障碍（BPD）通常被认为以对情绪刺激的敏感性增强为特征。在本研究中，我们调查了 BPD 患者是否相对于健康对照组表现出对情绪面部表情的更高检测能力。对环境中情绪信息的检测代表了情绪敏感性的一个重要方面。
将 20 名 BPD 患者与 25 名健康对照组进行比较。参与者被呈现快速、连续的中性和随机插入的情绪面部表情，并在每次试验后被要求报告情绪面部刺激的呈现。通过两种不同的任务要求来操纵认知资源的可用性。
与健康对照组相比，BPD 患者在检测正性和负性面部表情方面表现出显著更好的成绩。两组的假警报率没有显著差异。
BPD 参与者表现出对情绪表达的增强检测，这可能与他们所经历的情绪障碍有关。特别是，我们将讨论这种优越的情绪检测（结合先前报告的情绪状态标记缺陷）对于理解 BPD 中的情绪不稳定的作用。
