Self-other disturbance in borderline personality disorder: Neural, self-report, and performance-based evidence

Abstract

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) display an impoverished sense of self and representations of self and others that shift between positive and negative poles. However, little research has investigated the nature of representational disturbance in BPD. The present study takes a multimodal approach. A card sort task was used to investigate complexity, integration, and valence of self-representation in BPD. Impairment in maintenance of self and other representations was assessed using a personality representational maintenance task. Finally, functional MRI (fMRI) was used to assess whether individuals with BPD show neural abnormalities related specifically to the self and what brain areas may be related to poor representational maintenance. Individuals with BPD sorted self-aspects suggesting more complexity of self-representation, but also less integration and more negative valence overall. On the representational maintenance task, individuals with BPD showed less consistency in their representations of self and others over the 3-hr period, but only for abstract, personality-based representations. Performance on this measure mediated between-groups brain activation in several areas supporting social cognition. We found no evidence for social-cognitive disturbance specific to the self. Additionally, the BPD group showed main effects, insensitive to condition, of hyperactivation in the medial prefrontal cortex, temporal parietal junction, several regions of the frontal pole, the precuneus and middle temporal gyrus, all areas crucial social cognition. In contrast, controls evidenced greater activation in visual, sensory, motor, and mirror neuron regions. These findings are discussed in relation to research regarding hypermentalization and the overlap between self- and other-disturbance.

Figure 1

Means and standard errors for the self and other representational maintenance task. Individual with BPD had lower consistency specific to personality traits over three hours.

Figure 2

Peak activation from selected clusters from BPD>control ANOVA contrast. More positive betas for the control group relative to BPD are in light blue to blue. More positive betas for the BPD group are light green to red. Areas shown are a) left Precentral/inferior frontal gyrus, b) supplemental motor area, and c) precuenous. Maps thresholded at z=4.89. Color bar refers to z-scores.