Impaired memory for cooperative interaction partners in borderline personality disorder

Inga Niedtfeld,Meike Kroneisen

doi:10.1186/s40479-020-00137-3

Abstract

BackgroundInterpersonal disturbances in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been attributed to a negativity bias in social cognition. Adding to this literature, we experimentally tested whether those with BPD show altered memory for cooperative versus non-cooperative interaction partners.MethodsIn a source memory paradigm, 51 female BPD patients and 50 healthy controls (HC) played a trust game with 40 different female target characters (trustworthy vs untrustworthy). In a subsequent surprise memory test, participants had to recognize those target individuals (vs distractor pictures), and had to recall whether they had shown cooperative behavior during the trust game. We hypothesized that BPD patients have better memory for uncooperative interaction partners as compared to cooperative interaction partners, and that a-priori expectations of untrustworthiness would influence recall.ResultsDuring the trust game, BPD individuals invested lower amounts of money than HC for trustworthy targets, but no differences were found for untrustworthy targets. During the memory test, BPD patients had significant difficulties to remember cooperative targets, as compared to HC. More specifically, those with BPD indicated more often than HC that they had not previously interacted with cooperative targets of the previous trust game. We did not detect any differences between BPD and HC in source memory, or with regard to the effects of trustworthiness expectations.ConclusionsThe observed tendency to forget cooperative interaction partners in BPD is possibly caused by dysfunctional cognitive schemas. At the same time, it might also corroborate patients’ assumptions that others are untrustworthy, thereby fuelling interpersonal disturbances in BPD.

Highlights

Interpersonal Problems are considered one of the most stable symptoms in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) [1, 2]
We chose BPD as an exemplary population, since patients show a high level of interpersonal dysfunction across several domains [13], and there is a substantial body of previous studies on social cognition in BPD [9], enabling us to deduce hypotheses
Selection of stimulus material Since it was unclear whether the manipulation of expectancy would be successful in BPD patients or might be distorted due to evaluation biases [20], we decided not to rely on photographs that were used in previous studies with the source memory paradigm in healthy subjects [30]

Summary

Introduction

Interpersonal Problems are considered one of the most stable symptoms in BPD [1, 2]. Relatedly, dysfunctional behavior or suicide attempts accumulate in the course of problematic interactions [3, 4]. We chose to Niedtfeld and Kroneisen Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation (2020) 7:22 investigate a sample of BPD patients to study the role of memory processes in patients with interpersonal problems, but without the expectation that these effects are specific for BPD. We chose BPD as an exemplary population, since patients show a high level of interpersonal dysfunction across several domains [13], and there is a substantial body of previous studies on social cognition in BPD [9], enabling us to deduce hypotheses. Interpersonal disturbances in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been attributed to a negativity bias in social cognition. Adding to this literature, we experimentally tested whether those with BPD show altered memory for cooperative versus non-cooperative interaction partners

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