Borderline personality traits and brain activity during emotional perspective taking.

Abstract

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by disturbances in emotional, behavioral, and social functioning. The relation between BPD and empathy, which may affect the functional difficulties associated with this disorder, is complex because there is some evidence of heightened empathic processing and some evidence of reduced empathic processing in BPD. The current study was designed to investigate the association between BPD traits and brain activity during an empathic processing task (emotion perspective taking) in a nonclinical sample (N = 82). Participants completed the Five-Factor Borderline Inventory and underwent functional MRI while conducting an emotional perspective-taking task. Higher BPD trait scores were associated with hypoactivity in two brain regions involved in cognitive empathy (superior temporal sulcus and the temporoparietal junction). These data provide support to existing models describing the heterogeneous nature of BPD and suggest that reduced neural activity may in part affect altered empathic processing in BPD.