Reduced sensitivity to emotional facial expressions in borderline personality disorder: effects of emotional valence and intensity.
A heightened sensitivity towards negative emotional stimuli has been described for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). We investigated whether a faster and more accurate detection of negatively valent information in BPD can be confirmed by means of a visual search task which required subjects to detect a face with an incongruent emotional expression within a crowd of neutral faces. Twenty eight BPD patients and 28 nonpatients were asked to indicate whether a set of schematic neutral faces (3 × 3, 4 × 4 matrices) contained a happy or an angry face. Besides valence, the intensity of the target's emotion was varied in two steps. BPD patients and nonpatients both demonstrated an anger-superiority effect. However, no higher sensitivity towards negative stimuli was observed in BPD compared to nonpatients. BPD patients seem to rely to a stronger extent on controlled, i.e., serial, attention demanding processes when searching more subtle social-emotional information with positive valence.
Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany.
M
M
Hagenhoff
N
N
Franzen
L
L
Gerstner
G
G
Koppe
G
G
Sammer
P
P
Netter
B
B
Gallhofer
S
S
Lis
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001883:Borderline Personality Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology