Abstract
Social difficulties are apparent in borderline personality disorder (BPD). Behavior in BPD is characterized by mistrust and expectations of malevolence from others. We examined whether there is an asymmetry between their social behavior and their belief about other people’s social motivations. Subjects completed a task where they had to allocate money between themselves and an imagined other they will not meet and interact with. In addition they also had to report their expectations about how the imagined other would solve the task. We hypothesized that even though BPD patients will act in a prosocial way, they will expect selfish behavior from the other. We used the Slider Measure of social value orientation (SVO) and also created a modified version of the measure to examine the discrepancy between the subjects’ own SVO and their expectations from other people. We compared the results of thirty clinically diagnosed BPD patients to a matched sample of healthy participants. Our results show that the BPD group’s selfishness expectations significantly outweigh the expectations of selfishness in the HC group (U = 269, p = 0.007). This result further supports the mistrust and negativity bias observed in various aspects of social interactions in BPD.
Highlights
Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show intense reactions to perceived abandonment, a high degree of mistrust, and a distorted, negative perception of others (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
Results of the test showed that the social value orientation (SVO) angle differences were significantly greater in the BPD (Mdn = 36.53) than in the control group (Mdn = 24.47), U = 269, z = −2.684, p = 0.007, r = 0.346 (Figure 1)
This result indicates that the BPD group expects significantly more proself orientation relative to their own SVO than the control group
Summary
Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show intense reactions to perceived abandonment, a high degree of mistrust, and a distorted, negative perception of others (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). There are reports about enhanced or preserved emotion recognition and mentalization in BPD (e.g., Fertuck et al, 2009), increasing the complexity of mentalization tasks can highlight the difficulties of BPD patients (Minzenberg et al, 2006; Preißler et al, 2010). The majority of findings point to the direction that people with BPD do have mentalization impairments (Salgado et al, 2020). They misinterpret social cues with a pronounced negative bias (Roepke et al, 2013) or fail to accurately perceive positive and neutral cues (Unoka et al, 2014). Negative bias appears when judging traits like approachability and trustworthiness of a person from a photo (Fertuck et al, 2013; Miano et al, 2013; Nicol et al, 2013)
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