title: Emotion recognition in borderline personality disorder: effects of emotional information on negative bias.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe deficits in social interactions, which might be linked to deficits in emotion recognition. Research on emotion recognition abilities in BPD revealed heterogeneous results, ranging from deficits to heightened sensitivity. The most stable findings point to an impairment in the evaluation of neutral facial expressions as neutral, as well as to a negative bias in emotion recognition; that is the tendency to attribute negative emotions to neutral expressions, or in a broader sense to report a more negative emotion category than depicted. However, it remains unclear which contextual factors influence the occurrence of this negative bias. Previous studies suggest that priming by preceding emotional information and also constrained processing time might augment the emotion recognition deficit in BPD.
  
  
  METHODS
  To test these assumptions, 32 female BPD patients and 31 healthy females, matched for age and education, participated in an emotion recognition study, in which every facial expression was preceded by either a positive, neutral or negative scene. Furthermore, time constraints for processing were varied by presenting the facial expressions with short (100 ms) or long duration (up to 3000 ms) in two separate blocks.
  
  
  RESULTS
  BPD patients showed a significant deficit in emotion recognition for neutral and positive facial expression, associated with a significant negative bias. In BPD patients, this emotion recognition deficit was differentially affected by preceding emotional information and time constraints, with a greater influence of emotional information during long face presentations and a greater influence of neutral information during short face presentations.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our results are in line with previous findings supporting the existence of a negative bias in emotion recognition in BPD patients, and provide further insights into biased social perceptions in BPD patients.
authors.affiliation: Central Institute of Mental Health, University of Heidelberg / Medical Faculty Mannheim, J5 68159 Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fenske
authors.affiliation: Central Institute of Mental Health, University of Heidelberg / Medical Faculty Mannheim, J5 68159 Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lis
authors.affiliation: Central Institute of Mental Health, University of Heidelberg / Medical Faculty Mannheim, J5 68159 Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Liebke
authors.affiliation: Central Institute of Mental Health, University of Heidelberg / Medical Faculty Mannheim, J5 68159 Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Inga
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Niedtfeld
authors.affiliation: Central Institute of Mental Health, University of Heidelberg / Medical Faculty Mannheim, J5 68159 Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kirsch
authors.affiliation: Central Institute of Mental Health, University of Heidelberg / Medical Faculty Mannheim, J5 68159 Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mier
keywords: Affect processing; Borderline personality disorder; Context; Emotion recognition; Emotion regulation; Facial affect; Negative bias; Social cognition