Abstract
BackgroundMany experimental studies have evaluated Linehan’s biological emotional vulnerability in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). However, some inconsistencies were observed in operationalizing and supporting its components. This study aims at clarifying which aspects of Linehan’s model are altered in BPD, considering a multimodal evaluation of processes concerned with emotional responsiveness (self-report, psychophysiology and eye-tracking).MethodsForty-eight socio-emotional pictures were administered to 28 participants (14 BPD, 14 Healthy Controls, HCs), gender- and age-matched, by employing two different lengths of stimuli exposure (5 s and 15 s).ResultsOur results supported the hypersensitivity hypothesis in terms of faster physiological responses and altered visual processing. Furthermore, hypersensitivity was associated with detailed socio-emotional contents. Hyperreactivity assumption was not experimentally sustained by physiological and self-report data. Ultimately, the slow return to emotional baseline was demonstrated as an impaired emotional modulation.ConclusionsOur data alternatively supported the hypersensitivity and the slow return to emotional baseline hypotheses, postulated by Linehan’s Biosocial model, rather than the hyperreactivity assumption. Results have been discussed in light of other BPD core psychopathological processes.
Highlights
Many experimental studies have evaluated Linehan’s biological emotional vulnerability in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
Kaiser and colleagues [29] showed that BPD patients with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) exhibited more and longer fixations on the eye region of angry/happy blends, as well as more fixations on the eye region displaying high levels of sadness compared to HCs
Taking into account the previous inconsistencies in the operationalization of Linehan’s Biosocial model dimensions and considering the inconclusive empirical findings related to BPD emotional responsiveness, this study aimed at experimentally investigating the emotional hypersensitivity and hyperreactivity hypotheses and the slow return to emotional baseline assumption
Summary
Many experimental studies have evaluated Linehan’s biological emotional vulnerability in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). BPD patients seemed mostly characterized by difficulties in disengaging attention from threating cues, rather than an initial allocation towards emotional stimuli, in line with other studies [16, 17] Despite these results were in line with the concept of hypersensitivity, the data acquisition procedures limited to draw conclusion about the role of attentional processes in operationalizing such dimension of Linehan’s Biosocial model. Despite the wide use of eye-tracking methodology among several clinical conditions (e.g., [23, 24]) and nonclinical population [25,26,27], solely three studies [19, 28, 29] investigated the automatic attentional allocation on socio-emotional cues among BPD subjects These studies showed that BPD patients exhibited faster saccades towards the eyes of briefly presented (i.e., 150 ms) neutral faces and slower saccades away from fearful eyes [19]. To our knowledge no eye-tracking study was published on BPD sample using more complex visual stimuli
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