Insensitivity to the Magnitude of Potential Gains or Losses When Making Risky Choices: Women With Borderline Personality Disorder Compared With Bipolar Disorder and Controls.

Abstract

Poor decision-making is a feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and bipolar disorder (BD). Twenty women with BPD, 20 women with BD, and 20 healthy females completed a risky choice task. Those with BPD exhibited altered processing of information about potential gains and losses, with a bias toward large compared to small gains, large compared to small losses, and a tendency to choose outcomes with a negative expected value. This failure to use explicit reinforcement signals was not observed in those with BD. Difficulties using reward information to make decisions may impair day-to-day function. Such impairments offer new treatment targets in BPD.