Abstract
Previous research has suggested that patients meeting criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) display altered self-related information processing. However, experimental studies on dysfunctional self-referential information processing in BPD are rare. In this study, BPD patients (N = 30) and healthy control participants (N = 30) judged positive, neutral, and negative words in terms of emotional valence. Referential processing was manipulated by a preceding self-referential pronoun, an other-referential pronoun, or no referential context. Subsequently, patients and participants completed a free recall and recognition task. BPD patients judged positive and neutral words as more negative than healthy control participants when the words had self-reference or no reference. In BPD patients, these biases were significantly correlated with self-reported attributional style, particularly for negative events, but unrelated to measures of depressive mood. However, BPD patients did not differ from healthy control participants in a subsequent free recall task and a recognition task. Our findings point to a negative evaluation bias for positive, self-referential information in BPD. This bias did not affect the storage of information in memory, but may be related to self-attributions of negative events in everyday life in BPD.
Highlights
During the last decades, many studies have investigated the special meaning of the processing of information related to the self
We investigated whether the emotional evaluation of and the memory for information is altered in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) depending on the referential context and the emotional content of the stimuli
Our findings revealed a negative evaluation bias for positive and neutral stimuli depending on the referential context, alterations in attributional style and a link of the attribution of negative events to the negative evaluation bias in BPD patients
Summary
Many studies have investigated the special meaning of the processing of information related to the self. Self-reference has been shown to influence information processing at an early sensory stage as well as during later stages including cognitive functions such as evaluation and memory [1,2,3,4]. Healthy subjects describe themselves with more positive traits in comparison to others, which means they have a positive evaluation bias of themselves. They remember self-related information better, and this effect is most pronounced for positive information [2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. It is assumed that information related to the self is PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0117083 January 22, 2015
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