Abstract
Research suggests many shared clinical features across individuals with Schizotypal Personality Disorder (SPD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), including problems with attention/ executive functioning and mood. Therefore, aspects of these areas of functioning were compared in SPD and BPD to better characterize their respective difficulties. BPD, SPD, and healthy control (HC) participants were administered measures of cognitive and mood functioning. Compared with healthy controls, SPD patients performed significantly worse on aspects of the Delayed-Matching- to-Sample task, a measure of short-term visual memory abilities; however, the individuals with BPD did not differ from healthy controls. Neither of the patient groups differed from HC’s on measures of processing speed or planning. With regard to mood functioning, the BPD group exhibited significantly higher levels of affective disturbance (e.g., sadness, fear, anger) compared with the SPD patients and HCs. Overall, findings suggest different patterns of fronto-subcortical weakness in each patient group. While SPD patients exhibited relative weakness with short-term memory, BPD patient performance on such measures did not reveal relative weakness compared with HCs but did implicate problems with mood.
Highlights
Personality disorders are pervasive in the general population, co-occur with major mental disorders, and are associated with serious impairment (Lenzenweger et al, 2007)
The primary goal of the current study was to elucidate aspects of neuropsychological and mood functioning in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Schizotypal Personality Disorder (SPD), respectively, by investigating areas where these two personality disorder groups exhibit potential weakness, within the domains implicated in prior work conducted by our group and others
Compared with healthy controls, SPD participants correctly answered a significantly smaller percentage of Delayed Matching to Sample trials, in which the stimulus and matching answer choices were presented with varying delays, p < 0.01, Tukey’s Honest Significant Difference (HSD), Figure 1
Summary
Personality disorders are pervasive in the general population, co-occur with major mental disorders, and are associated with serious impairment (Lenzenweger et al, 2007). Despite overlapping areas of neuropsychological weakness, BPD and SPD groups have been shown to differ phenomenologically in some areas: emotion dysregulation and self-damaging acts characterize BPD individuals, whereas blunted affect and social isolation frequently characterize SPD (McGlashan, 1987). Given these potentially overlapping and diverging neurobiological and phenotypic aspects of BPD and SPD, as well as the inherent complexity of both, this study offers a unique opportunity for clarifying neuropsychological and mood commonalities/distinctions in two separate personality disorders
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