Emotion regulation and borderline personality features in daily life: The role of social context

Abstract

Background: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with emotional dysfunction and interpersonal sensitivity. Yet, little work has characterized how BPD features predicts emotional reactivity and emotion regulation behaviors in response to interpersonal stress relative to other forms of stress.

Methods: Participants were 152 university students who completed baseline measures of BPD features and complied with two-week daily diary procedures assessing daily emotion regulation strategy use in response to social and non-social stressors.

Results: Generalized estimating equations revealed that BPD features predicted greater negative and positive emotions in response to daily stressors, and interacted with type of stressor in predicting urges and behaviors. Elevated BPD features was associated with greater urges for dysfunctional emotion regulatory behaviors and fewer functional emotion regulatory behaviors to a greater extent in response to social (versus non-social) stressors.

Limitations: This study was limited by its focus on past-day retrospective recall. Further, the student sample limits the generalizability of these findings.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that individuals with elevated BPD features may have less functional emotion regulation in social contexts.

Keywords: Borderline personality disorder (BPD); Emotion dysregulation; Emotion regulation.