Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Jun;8(5):531-7.
doi: 10.1093/scan/nss028. Epub 2012 Feb 22.

Neuronal correlates of social cognition in borderline personality disorder

Daniela Mier  1 , Stefanie Lis, Christine Esslinger, Carina Sauer, Meike Hagenhoff, Jens Ulferts, Bernd Gallhofer, Peter Kirsch
Affiliations

Neuronal correlates of social cognition in borderline personality disorder

Daniela Mier et al. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2013 Jun.

Abstract

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) have severe problems in social interactions that might be caused by deficits in social cognition. Since the findings about social-cognitive abilities in BPD are inhomogeneous, ranging from deficits to superior abilities, we aimed to investigate the neuronal basis of social cognition in BPD. We applied a paradigm with three social cognition tasks, differing in their complexity: basal processing of faces with a neutral expression, recognition of emotions, and attribution of emotional intentions (affective ToM). A total of 13 patients with BPD and 13 healthy matched controls (HCs) were included in a functional magnet resonance imaging study. BPD patients showed no deficits in social cognition on the behavioral level. However, while HCs showed increasing activation in areas of the mirror neuron system with increasing complexity in the social-cognitive task, BPD patients had hypoactivation in these areas and hyperactivation in the amygdala which were not modulated by task complexity. This activation pattern seems to reflect an enhanced emotional approach in the processing of social stimuli in BPD that allows good performance in standardized social-cognitive tasks, but might be the basis of social-cognitive deficits in real-life social interactions.

Keywords: amygdala; borderline personality disorder; functional magnetic resonance imaging; mirror neuron system; social cognition.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Experimental conditions and procedure, exemplarily shown for a single trial per condition.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Main effect of group. Displayed is the significantly increased left amygdala activation in the borderline patients compared to the healthy controls. Threshold for display: P < 0.005 uncorrected.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Mean signal change for both groups in the three conditions. (A) Signal change in the left amygdala. (B) Signal change in the right BA 44. (C) Signal change in the right STS. Note: BP = Borderline Patients, HC = Healthy Controls, ToM = affective ToM, Emo = Emotion recognition, Neutral = Neutral facial processing.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Adolphs R, Spezio M. Role of the amygdala in processing visual social stimuli. Progress in Brain Research. 2006;156:363–78. - PubMed
    1. Arntz A, Bernstein D, Oorschot M, Schobre P. Theory of mind in borderline and cluster-C personality disorder. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 2009;197(11):801–7. - PubMed
    1. Barnow S, Stopsack M, Grabe HJ, et al. Interpersonal evaluation bias in borderline personality disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2009;47(5):359–65. - PubMed
    1. Baron-Cohen S, Ring HA, Wheelwright S, et al. Social intelligence in the normal and autistic brain: an fMRI study. European Journal of Neuroscience. 1999;11(6):1891–8. - PubMed
    1. Beck AT, Steer RA, Ball R, Ranieri W. Comparison of Beck Depression Inventories-IA and -II in psychiatric outpatients. Journal of Personality Assessment. 1996;67(3):588–97. - PubMed

Publication types