Cited by 256Personality Disorders and PsychopathologyFace Recognition and PerceptionPersonality Traits and Psychology

Recognition of Facial Affect in Borderline Personality Disorder

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Domes, Gregor, Czieschnek, Daniela, Weidler, Franziska, Berger, Christoph, Fast, Kristina, Herpertz, Sabine C.·2008·Journal of Personality Disorders

Abstract

Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been described as emotionally hyperresponsive, especially to anger and fear in social contexts. The aim was to investigate whether BPD patients are more sensitive but less accurate in terms of basic emotion recognition, and show a bias towards perceiving anger and fear when evaluating ambiguous facial expressions. Twenty-five women with BPD were compared with healthy controls on two different facial emotion recognition tasks. The first task allowed the assessment of the subjective detection threshold as well as the number of evaluation errors on six basic emotions. The second task assessed a response bias to blends of basic emotions. BPD patients showed no general deficit on the affect recognition task, but did show enhanced learning over the course of the experiment. For ambiguous emotional stimuli, we found a bias towards the perception of anger in the BPD patients but not towards fear. BPD patients are accurate in perceiving facial emotions, and are probably more sensitive to familiar facial expressions. They show a bias towards perceiving anger, when socio-affective cues are ambiguous. Interpersonal training should focus on the differentiation of ambiguous emotion in order to reduce a biased appraisal of others.

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Crossref · 10.1521/pedi.2008.22.2.135

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  • Mentalizing tasks that focus attention on external features cause fewer problems for BPD patients, and BPD patients have been found to be hypersensitive to facial expressions.

    “the weight of evidence suggests that mentalizing tasks that focus attention on external features cause fewer problems for these patients, and BPD patients have actually been found to be hypersensitive to facial expressions”
  • People with Borderline Personality Disorder are hypersensitive to social exclusion.

    “Finally, research indicates that people with BPD are hypersensitive to social exclusion (Domes et al., 2008;Gratz, Dixon-Gordon, Breetz, & Tull, 2013;Renneberg et al., 2012), which may be explained by the cognitiveaffective processing bias proposed in RS.”

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Authors
Domes, G., Czieschnek, D., Weidler, F., Berger, C., Fast, K., & Herpertz, S. C.
Affiliations
  • University of Rostock (DE)
  • Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
Venue
Journal of Personality Disorders
Published
2008-04
Volume
22
Issue
2
Pages
135-147
ISSN
0885-579X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2051045321
Cited by
254
References
9
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 18 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 24 · 2013: 24 · 2012: 25
FWCI
16.38
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Journal of Personality Disorders (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (acceptedVersion)
  • FreiDok plus (Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg) (submittedVersion)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (submittedVersion)
  • Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Personality Disorders and Psychopathology
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Personality Traits and Psychology
Keywords
borderline personality disorder, facial emotion recognition, basic emotions, anger perception, fear perception, ambiguous facial expressions, response bias, emotional sensitivity, interpersonal training
MeSH terms
Adult, Affect, Analysis of Variance, Anger, Borderline Personality Disorder, Facial Expression, Fear, Female, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Middle Aged, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Reaction Time

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