Abstract
Emotion instability in borderline personality disorder (BPD) has been associated with an impaired fronto-limbic inhibitory network. However, functional connectivity (FC) underlying altered emotion regulation in BPD has yet to be established. Here, we used resting-state fMRI to investigate enduring effects of effortful emotion regulation on the amygdala intrinsic FC in BPD. In this multicenter study, resting-state fMRI was acquired before and after an emotion regulation task in 48 BPD patients and 39 non-patient comparison individuals. The bilateral amygdalae were used as a seed in the whole-brain FC analysis and two-way mixed ANOVA to test whether BPD patients exhibited weaker post-task increase in the amygdala intrinsic FC with the prefrontal cortex (PFC), compared to non-patients. Subsequently, we explored whether the results are common for personality disorders characterized by emotional problems, using additional data of 21 cluster-C personality disorder patients. In contrast to non-patients, BPD patients failed to show increased post-task amygdala resting-state FC with the medial, dorsolateral, ventrolateral PFC, and superior temporal gyrus, but surprisingly exhibited decreased FC with the posterior cingulate cortex and increased FC with the superior parietal lobule. In BPD patients, the emotion regulation task failed to increase resting-state amygdala FC with brain regions essential for effortful emotion regulation, which suggests: (a) altered cognitive control typically used to indirectly alleviate distress by reinterpreting the meaning of emotional stimuli; (b) impaired direct regulation of emotional responses, which might be common for personality disorders; (c) avoidance of self-related appraisals induced by social emotional stimuli.
Highlights
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric disorder with the prevalence in the general population estimated at approximately 1–3% [1, 2]
BPD patients show altered functional connectivity (FC) within the amygdala–prefrontal cortex (PFC) network when confronted with negative emotions, which is assumed to contribute to their affective instability and in the long-term shapes the organization of their resting-state networks
A common network of the intrinsic amygdala connectivity was obtained in both BPD and NPC before and after the emotion regulation task (Fig. S3a), which was identified as similar to patterns previously described in the literature [e.g., 49]
Summary
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric disorder with the prevalence in the general population estimated at approximately 1–3% [1, 2]. Resting-state fMRI studies showed that emotional hypersensitivity of BPD patients is associated with hyperconnectivity within the salience network [15], i.e., between the amygdala and bilateral insula together with dorsal ACC [13, 16,17,18,19], while their impaired control over emotional reactions is associated mostly with diminished intrinsic connectivity between the central executive fronto-parietal regions and salience network [16, 17]. BPD patients show altered FC within the amygdala–PFC network when confronted with negative emotions, which is assumed to contribute to their affective instability and in the long-term shapes the organization of their resting-state networks
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