Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, Germany; Jülich Aachen Research Alliance, Translational Brain Medicine, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, Germany; Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Psychiatry Res. 2014 Aug 15;218(1-2):134-42. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2014.04.027. Epub 2014 Apr 18.
Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) suffer from various impairments in emotional functioning such as affective instability, inappropriate anger and unstable relationships. These deficits may influence two fundamental motivational systems, the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral activation system (BAS). To investigate behavioral intentions and possible impairments in BPD we applied an implicit joystick task to measure implicit behavioral tendencies in response to facial expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear and neutral) in 25 patients with BPD and matched 25 healthy controls (HC). Additionally, we evaluated explicit approach and avoidance reactions to these social stimuli, emotion recognition abilities and subjective behavioral ratings. Our data analysis suggests that, although BPD patients accurately identified facial emotional expressions and reacted to them similarly as HC in the joystick task, they had significantly stronger avoidance tendencies in the rating task, especially for happiness and fear. On top of this they exhibited increased BIS sensitivity and decreased BAS sensitivity in the self-report measures. Possible influences are maladaptive cognitive schemas, high negative affect, insecure attachment style and a negative evaluation bias. The observed dysfunctional avoidance ratings may influence the appraisal of socially relevant stimuli and therefore adds further knowledge on social interaction problems in BPD.
边缘型人格障碍（BPD）患者在情绪功能方面存在多种障碍，例如情感不稳定、不适当的愤怒和不稳定的人际关系。这些缺陷可能会影响两个基本的动机系统，即行为抑制系统（BIS）和行为激活系统（BAS）。为了研究边缘型人格障碍患者的行为意向和可能存在的缺陷，我们应用了一种内隐操纵杆任务来测量对面部表情（快乐、悲伤、愤怒、恐惧和中性）的内隐行为倾向，共有 25 名边缘型人格障碍患者和 25 名匹配的健康对照组（HC）参与了该任务。此外，我们还评估了对这些社会刺激的外显接近和回避反应、情绪识别能力和主观行为评分。我们的数据分析表明，尽管边缘型人格障碍患者在操纵杆任务中准确地识别了面部情绪表达，并与 HC 做出了相似的反应，但他们在评分任务中表现出明显更强的回避倾向，尤其是对快乐和恐惧。除此之外，他们在自我报告测量中表现出更高的 BIS 敏感性和更低的 BAS 敏感性。可能的影响因素包括适应不良的认知模式、高负面情绪、不安全的依恋风格和负面评价偏见。观察到的功能失调的回避评分可能会影响对社交相关刺激的评估，因此为边缘型人格障碍患者的社交互动问题提供了进一步的知识。
