Accuracy for subtle facial emotional expressions among individuals with borderline personality disorder symptoms and diagnoses.

Abstract

Many studies, yielding mixed results, have examined whether individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) have skills or deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER). The present studies explored this issue in 2 samples using 3 novel approaches: First, we examined BPD symptoms continuously in a nonclinical sample. Second, we examined the ability of individuals with BPD or elevated BPD symptoms to accurately identify emotions in static faces presented with emotional expressions ranging from neutral to subtle to fully expressed emotion. Third, we parsed accuracy into both correctly identifying an emotion and correctly ruling out an emotion that is not present. In Study 1, the relation between FER and BPD symptoms was examined in a nonclinical sample of undergraduates. In Study 2, individuals with BPD were compared with individuals with current major depression and healthy controls. In the nonclinical sample, BPD symptoms were unrelated to FER. In the clinical sample, we found evidence for enhanced accuracy for subtle and fully expressed facial emotions among individuals with BPD. Specifically, the ability to rule out an emotion when it was in fact not displayed emerged as the source of this increased accuracy. In addition, we did not find evidence of a bias for incorrectly labeling neutral faces as negative emotional expressions in either sample. Our results expand upon existing FER research in BPD that has largely relied on fully expressed emotional stimuli by demonstrating higher accuracy among individuals with BPD for identifying subtle emotional states. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).