title: Facing the Problem: Impaired Emotion Recognition During Multimodal Social Information Processing in Borderline Personality Disorder.
abstract: Previous research has revealed alterations and deficits in facial emotion recognition in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). During interpersonal communication in daily life, social signals such as speech content, variation in prosody, and facial expression need to be considered simultaneously. We hypothesized that deficits in higher level integration of social stimuli contribute to difficulties in emotion recognition in BPD, and heightened arousal might explain this effect. Thirty-one patients with BPD and thirty-one healthy controls were asked to identify emotions in short video clips, which were designed to represent different combinations of the three communication channels: facial expression, speech content, and prosody. Skin conductance was recorded as a measure of sympathetic arousal, while controlling for state dissociation. Patients with BPD showed lower mean accuracy scores than healthy control subjects in all conditions comprising emotional facial expressions. This was true for the condition with facial expression only, and for the combination of all three communication channels. Electrodermal responses were enhanced in BPD only in response to auditory stimuli. In line with the major body of facial emotion recognition studies, we conclude that deficits in the interpretation of facial expressions lead to the difficulties observed in multimodal emotion processing in BPD.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychosomatic Medicine, Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Medical Faculty Mannheim/Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Inga
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Niedtfeld
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychosomatic Medicine, Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Medical Faculty Mannheim/Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Nadine
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Defiebre
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institut, Stockholm, Sweden.|Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
authors.forename: Christina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Regenbogen
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology, Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Medical Faculty Mannheim/Heidelberg University.
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mier
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology, Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Medical Faculty Mannheim/Heidelberg University.
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fenske
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology, Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Medical Faculty Mannheim/Heidelberg University.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kirsch
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychosomatic Medicine, Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Medical Faculty Mannheim/Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lis
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychosomatic Medicine, Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Medical Faculty Mannheim/Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Schmahl
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001883:Borderline Personality Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male