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. 2011 Apr;2(2):98-112.
doi: 10.1037/a0020011.

Mental state decoding abilities in young adults with borderline personality disorder traits

Lori N Scott  1 , Kenneth N Levy, Reginald B Adams Jr, Michael T Stevenson
Affiliations

Mental state decoding abilities in young adults with borderline personality disorder traits

Lori N Scott et al. Personal Disord. 2011 Apr.

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) tend to misattribute malevolence to benign social stimuli, including facial expressions. Yet, facial emotion recognition studies examining those with BPD have yielded mixed results, with some studies showing impaired accuracy and others demonstrating enhanced accuracy in the recognition of emotions or mental states. The current study examined the ability to decode mental states from photographs of just the eye region of faces in a nonclinical sample of young adults who exhibited BPD traits (high BPD) compared with those who did not (low BPD). Group differences in mental state decoding ability depended on the valence of the stimuli. The high-BPD group performed better for negative stimuli compared with the low-BPD group, but did not perform significantly different from the low-BPD group for stimuli of neutral or positive valence. The high-BPD group also demonstrated a response bias for attributing negative mental states to facial stimuli. In addition, findings suggested that the group difference in accuracy for negative stimuli could not be explained by response bias, because the group difference in response bias for negative stimuli did not reach significance. These findings suggest that BPD traits may be associated with enhanced ability to detect negative emotions and a bias for attributing negative emotions to nonnegative social stimuli.

Keywords: Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test; borderline personality disorder; emotion recognition; mental state decoding; response bias.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Mean response times (ms) in high-borderline personality disorder (high-BPD; n = 38) and low-BPD (n = 46) groups for Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RME) stimuli in each valence category. No significant group differences in response times were found. SEs are represented in the figure by the error bars attached to each column.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mean percent task accuracy in high-borderline personality disorder (high-BPD; n = 38) and low-BPD (n = 46) groups for Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RME) stimuli in each valence category. Groups differed significantly in accuracy for negative stimuli (*p < .05), but not for neutral or positive stimuli (ps > .05). SEs are represented in the figure by the error bars attached to each column.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Mean response valence in high-borderline personality disorder (high-BPD; n = 38) and low-BPD (n = 46) groups for Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RME) stimuli in each valence category. The main effect of group was significant, with the high-BPD group showing a negative response bias (p = .03). There was no significant interaction between valence and group (p > .05). SEs are represented in the figure by the error bars attached to each column.
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